Introduction to Cryptography with Coding Theory, 3rd Edition

9.7 The Public Key Concept

In 1976, Diffie and Hellman described the concept of public key cryptography, though at that time no realizations of the concept were publicly known (as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Clifford Cocks of the British cryptographic agency CESG had invented a secret version of RSA in 1973). In this section, we give the general theory of public key systems.

There are several implementations of public key cryptography other than RSA. In later chapters we describe three of them. One is due to ElGamal and is based on the difficulty of finding discrete logarithms. A second is NTRU and involves lattice methods. The third is due to McEliece and uses error correcting codes. There are also public key systems based ...