Public-key Cryptography: Theory and Practice

6.1. Introduction

Public-key cryptographic protocols deal with sets like the ring of integers modulo n, the multiplicative group of units in a finite field or the group of points in an elliptic curve over a finite field. Messages that need to be encrypted or signed are, on the other hand, usually human-readable text or numbers or keys of secret-key cryptographic protocols, which are typically represented in computers in the form of sequences of ...