import Crypto from Crypto.PublicKey import RSA key = RSA.generate(1024) nonce = 24 ciphertext = key.encrypt("message",nonce)

%timeit

ciphertext = key.encrypt("message",nonce)

625 loops, best of 3: 30.5 s per loop

%timeit

key.decrypt(ciphertext)

625 loops, best of 3: 483 s per loop

From the above output you can see that RSA decryption is at least 10 times slower than RSA encryption. Why is that?