Confidentiality. The most common application of Asymmetric Encryption is confidentiality.

This is achieved by sending critical information by encrypting it with the receiver’s public key
and decrypting it with its own private key.

Authenticity using Digital Signatures. A sender attaches his private key to the message as a
digital signature and exchanges it with the receiver. The receiver uses the sender’s public key
and verifies whether the private key sent belongs to the sender, hence ascertaining the sender’s
authenticity.

Integrity of Information Exchange. One way the hash of the data to be exchanged is created
and encrypted using the sender’s private key. Encrypted hash and data are exchanged with the
receiver. Using the sender’s public key, the receiver decrypts the hash and recreates the hash.
Any difference between the two hashes indicates the content is altered after signature and
integrity are lost. This kind of integrity check is followed in digital cash and bit coin transactions.

Non-repudiation. With the digital signature encryption tool in place, the owner of a document
or information who exchanged it with others cannot disown the content, and a transaction done
online cannot be disowned by its originator.

It is convenient. Asymmetric encryption solves the problem of distributing keys for encryption,
with everyone publishing their public keys, while private keys being kept secret.

It detects tampering. With digital signatures in public key encryption, message recipients can
detect if a message was altered in transit.

Asymmetric encryption provides a platform for securely exchanging information without having
to share private keys. Non-repudiation, Authentication using Digital signatures, and Integrity are
the other unique features offered by this encryption.

This method also overcomes the lacuna of Symmetric encryption (the need to exchange the
secret key used for encryption/decryption) by exchanging the key alone through public
key/private key in an asymmetric way and still exchanging high volume data using symmetric
mode.