Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
The RSA Cryptosystem
After Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman introduced public-key cryptography in
their landmark 1976 paper [58], a new branch of cryptography suddenly opened
up. As a consequence, cryptologists started looking for methods with which public-
key encryption could be realized. In 1977, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard
Adleman (cf. Fig. 7.1) proposed a scheme which became the most widely used
asymmetric cryptographic scheme, RSA.
Fig. 7.1
An early picture of Adi Shamir, Ron Rivest, and Leonard Adleman (reproduced with
permission from Ron Rivest)
In this chapter you will learn:
How RSA works
Practical aspects of RSA, such as computation of the parameters, and fast en-
cryption and decryption
Security estimations
Implementational aspects
