Serious Cryptography

10RSA

The Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) cryptosystem revolutionized cryptography when it emerged in 1977 as the first public-key encryption scheme; whereas classical, symmetric-key encryption schemes use the same secret key to encrypt and decrypt messages, public-key encryption (also called asymmetric encryption) uses two keys: one is your public key, which can be used by anyone who wants to encrypt messages for you, and the other is your private key, which is required in order to decrypt messages encrypted using the public key. This magic is the reason why RSA came as a real breakthrough, and 40 years later, it’s still the paragon of public-key ...