Talk:RSA

Archived discussion from 27th December 2001 – 31st August 2004: Talk:RSA/archive1


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Contents

Destroying P and Q

Will people please stop saying that good implementations destroy P and Q. In fact, good implementations keep P and Q, and never calculate D at all; they use the Chinese Remainder Theorem to speed up private key operations, and calculate a separate D for P and Q. Furthermore, it has long been known that P and Q are easily determined given N, E, and D. So there is no point to this misleading advice. ciphergoth 19:54, 2004 Nov 30 (UTC)

To Featured Article standard?

Would anyone be interested in working this article up to "Featured Article" standard? What would it need? I guess some sort of diagram or illustration is usually asked for, and references. — Matt 17:45, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The most important thing would be a proper treatment of padding and security for encryption and signing - without them, it's positively misleading. ciphergoth 19:54, 2004 Nov 30 (UTC)

Proof

Should we be including a proof of RSA in this section? Revived 22:31, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

What do you mean by a "proof of RSA"? Do you mean a proof that decryption "works"? If so, no; TBH I'd rather move away from presenting the idea of a "decryption exponent" at all, in favour of directly using the Chinese Remainder Theorem to do decryption. This would be easier to understand, closer to what is really done in practice, and gets rid of the misleading idea that the public and secret key operations are somehow 'symmetric' when for all practical purposes they aren't. Hopefully it would discourage people from saying misleading things like "signing is encryption with the private key".
If on the other hand you mean a proof that RSA is secure, there is no such proof. — ciphergoth 12:15, 2004 Dec 29 (UTC)

Earlier Work

The history section of the article gives the impression that Rivest, Shamir and Adleman invented the algorithm out of thin air although very similar work had actually been published shortly before by others. For example: Stephen C. Pohlig and Martin E. Hellman, An Improved Algorithm for Computing Logarithms over GF(p) and its Cryptographic Significance, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION THEORY (Jan. 1978) (article submitted on June 17, 1976). Unfortunately I don't have easy access to this article - I've only found it referenced on http://www.cyberlaw.com/rsa.html.

Can we cite a source showing that Rivest, Shamir and Adleman were influenced by (or are believed to have been influenced by) Pohlig and Hellman's work? (RSA was published as an MIT tech report in April 1977, before Pohlig-Hellman's pub in Jan 1978).— Matt Crypto 18:44, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
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