Interview Question for Information Security Operations at Netflix:

- symmetric encryption uses the same (secret) key for encryption and decryption; asymmetric - two different ones (public and private)
- symmetric key is shared between communicating parties, which makes key distribution hard to scale (for N parties to talk to each other they need to estalish secret key for each possible pair - N-square problem)
- asymmetric keys are easier to distribute: one keeps one's private key and publicly distributes the corresponding public key
- symmetric crypto is typically stronger than asymmetric one for comparable key sizes
- symmetric crypto is typically faster
- it is common to use symmetric crypto to encrypt plaintext with some random (session) key and then pass this key encrypted with the recipient's public key

- one can go on and on for hours - it is a vast subject