Enctyption Question

It depends. For some applications symmetric key encryption algorithms will be better than asymmetric key algorithms. For other applications, it will be the opposite.

Since symmetric key encryption is amenable to being implemented in hardware, you see it used a lot in bulk encryption where large amounts of data needs to be encrypted. Asymmetric encryption is compute-intensive (nearly 1000 times more than symmetric algorithms) but since key management is easier, it is good for use with digital signatures etc.

Cisco da Gama