Editing ElGamal encryption (section)

=== Practical use ===

Like most public key systems, the ElGamal cryptosystem is usually used as part of a [[hybrid cryptosystem]], where the message itself is encrypted using a symmetric cryptosystem, and ElGamal is then used to encrypt only the symmetric key. This is because asymmetric cryptosystems like ElGamal are usually slower than symmetric ones for the same [[level of security]], so it is faster to encrypt the message, which can be arbitrarily large, with a symmetric cipher, and then use ElGamal only to encrypt the symmetric key, which usually is quite small compared to the size of the message.