# Encryption & Cryptography

For encrypting and decrypting individual pieces of content for storage within the Privy ecosystem, [AES-256](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard) symmetric key encryption is used. Alongside being utilized primarily and actively by federal governments and industry, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has described AES-256 as [less impacted](https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/publications/nistir/8105/final/documents/nistir_8105_draft.pdf) by sufficiently large quantum computing, quoting “larger key sizes needed”. For peer-to-peer exchange of encrypted data, we further utilize [on-chain](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9126004) Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Both AES-256 and the private keys necessary for DHKE are generated locally by the client in an end-to-end encrypted manner.

<br>