Should we merge [hybrid] and [hybrid-encryption]?

Question

I just noticed that we the following pair of seemingly duplicate tags:

• hybrid currently has 20 questions, and a tag wiki that says:

  Something of mixed origin. In cryptography, typically a cipher system containing both public key and secret key component ciphers, where the public key system is used only to transport the key for the secret key cipher. It is the secret key cipher which actually enciphers and protects the data.

• hybrid-encryption currently has 8 questions, and no tag wiki.

A brief look at the questions under each tag suggests that most of them are about the same thing, and should be under the same tag. I personally feel that, despite being currently less used and lacking a wiki, hybrid-encryption would be a better choice for the name of this tag, as it's less ambiguous.

(That said, there are also currently a bunch of questions under the hybrid tag that are not about hybrid symmetric+asymmetric cryptosystems, such as this, this and this. Some of them probably don't really need that tag at all, and should just have it removed, but somebody does need to go through them and figure out what to do in each case.)

Also, we might some day want to have a tag for questions about hybrid arguments. I definitely feel that mixing those together with questions about hybrid cryptosystems under the same tag would be a bad idea.

Answer 1

Yes, merging hybrid into hybrid-encryption is adequate.

I suggest a definition: Hybrid encryption combines secret-key and public-key cryptography into an encryption scheme. It is kept the distinctive advantage of public-key cryptography that the sender needs no prior shared secret with the recipient, only her/his public key. And performance is typically better than with pure public-key encryption, in term of speed and size overhead, especially for large messages.