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Table Of Contents
Cryptography Engineering
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The RSA system is probably the most widely used public-key cryptosystem in the world. It is certainly the best known. It provides both digital signatures and public-key encryption, which makes it a very versatile tool, and it is based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers, a problem that has fascinated many people over the last few millennia and has been studied extensively.
RSA is similar to, yet very different from, Diffie-Hellman (see Chapter 11). Diffie-Hellman (DH for short) is based on a one-way function: assuming p and g are publicly known, you can compute (gx mod p) from x, but you cannot compute x given gx mod p. RSA is based on a trapdoor one-way function. Given the publicly known information n and e, it is easy to compute me mod n from m, but not the other way around. However, if you know the factorization of n, then it is easy to do the inverse computation. The factorization of n is the trapdoor information. If you know it, you can...
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