As discussed in the lecture, rsa is based on which of the following problem(s)?

We talked about the ideas behind public key cryptography last lecture. How do we implement such a scheme? This is where number theory comes to the rescue in the form of the RSA crypto system. RSA stands for Rivest, Shamir and Adelman, who discovered the scheme in 1977. Clifford Cocks had independently discovered this earlier in 1973, but his work was classified and remained unknown for many years.

A link to the original RSA paper is here.

Messages As Numbers

First, let us get some preliminary concepts out of the way. We will regard messages as numbers. The idea is that your message is encoded as a number through a scheme such as ASCII. The rest of this presentation will deal with encrypting and decrypting numbers.

Basic Idea

Suppose Alice wished to send a message

to Bob that she wished Bob and no one else to read. In a public key system, she will obtain Bob's public key and encrypt the message using Bob's public key to obtain a encrypted message . This is sent to Bob.

Upon receiving the message from Alice, Bob decrypts it using his private key. No one else can decrypt the message unless they have Bob's private key.

How do we implement this in practice?

The basic idea behind RSA is to create a one-way function

that given a message and a public key , encrypts the message by computing to yield the cipher .

The reason

is called one-way is that

However, if it is hard for someone to invert

, how is it that Bob can do so?

• We will assume that using the private key, Bob has a function

  that will allow him to compute
  .

So our scheme should give us functions

where is easy to compute but very hard to invert. On the other hand, is easy to compute and inverts if the private key is available.

Number Theory to the Rescue

The basic scheme for RSA uses a really large number

.

• The public key is a pair of numbers

• The private key is a pair of numbers

  .

Each message

is assumed to be a number between and . If is really large, we allow a large space of numbers to code our messages with.

The basic idea is to encrypt a message

by computing . This operation is called modular exponentiation. It is computationally inexpensive to compute even though and are typically large numbers in an RSA implementation.

Example

Let us take a message

and encrypt it using the public key .

We will simply compute

On the first sight, this modular exponentiation looks like an atrociously hard computation. But remember that

is infectious :-].

Therefore, we can first compute this by repeated squaring and modulo operations. Here is how we compute for our example using python interpreter

Example Computation

bash$ python

Python 2.7.6 [v2.7.6:3a1db0d2747e, Nov 10 2013, 00:42:54]
[GCC 4.2.1 [Apple Inc. build 5666] [dot 3]] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> c1 = [1098 **2] % 41989
>>> c1
29912
>>> c2 = [c1 **2] % 41989
>>> c2
26132
>>> c3 = [c2 **2] %41989
>>> c3
14317
>>> c4 = [c3 * c2] % 41989
>>> c4
9854
>>> c5 = [c4 * 1098] % 41989
>>> c5
28519

However, a snooper who simply sees the encrypted message

and the public key will find it very hard to figure out the message . This problem is considered to be a computationally hard problem, and is called the RSA problem.

So far, we have identified our one way function

, which is given by modular exponentiation . We have claimed that inverting when given and the public key is computationally a hard problem. There is no known efficient algorithm for this problem, to date.

Now the idea is to find a private key

that satisfies . In other words, if we take the encrypted message and perform modular exponentiation with the private key , we obtain the original message back.

This means that we need

to satisfy the property that for any message ,

In other words, we require that

.

The question is how can we find a pair

that will satisfy this relation, and furthermore, given it should be hard to find the corresponding .

Some Preliminaries

We say that two numbers

are relatively prime if they have no prime factors in common. In other words, are relatively prime if their greatest common divisor .

Euler's Theorem

You can skip this section on a first read

The answer comes from a result proved by Euler in 1741, called the Euler's Totient theorem. We will first examine the Totient function.

As an example, consider

. The numbers that are relatively prime to include .

Therefore

.

Interestingly, given a number

, is rather hard to compute. But there are numbers for which it is relatively easy.

Totient Function for Prime Numbers

Theorem: The totient function

for a prime number is simply .

The proof is simply to note that every number

is relatively prime to .

Another important result about Totient functions is as follows:

Totient functions for products of primes

If

and are prime numbers, such that , then .

Let us look at all numbers between

that have a common factor with . These can only be multiples of or multiples of . The reader can convince themselves that there are of these numbers. Therefore, .

Here is what Euler's theorem says:

Euler's Theorem

Let

be relatively prime numbers. We have .

The proof is rather elegant. Let

be the set of all the numbers relatively prime with . Here and belongs to this set. Now consider . It is possible to show that and are, in fact, the same sets.

Therefore,

We therefore conclude that

, or in other words .

RSA Scheme

We are now ready to talk about the basic RSA scheme.

The idea is to choose two different large prime numbers

and compute . Let us assume , in general.

We now wish to find a pair

and for the public and private keys such that for any message , we have .

Choosing any message

between , we can use Totient's theorem to guarantee that

.

Therefore, if we choose any positive

, we still obtain

.

Therefore,

, for any .

Our goal is now to find

such that

.

In other words,

.

We follow the following steps to do so:

• Choose large primes

  with
  .

• Let

  .

• Let

  .

• Choose a number

  with
  that is relatively prime with
  .

• Compute

  such that
  for some
  . This is done using the Euclidean Algorithm.

Finally, we discard

and simply retain . We publish as the public key and retain as the private key.

Encryption

Encrypting a message

is performed by modular exponentiation with public key:

.

Likewise, decryption uses the private key

.

Decryption

Given cipher-text

, we recover the original message as

Let us illustrate this:

Encryption: Take a message

represented as a number from . The encrypted value of is .

Example: Using public key

and message , we have .

To decrypt, we have to compute

= .

Breaking RSA

Let us assume that some one has access to the public key

. What stops them from finding out , the secret key?

After all,

. Therefore, by factorizing , we can find and repeat the process for ourselves to compute and . Once is known then the whole scheme goes kaput.

Problem [Factoring] Given a number

that we are told is the product of two as yet unknown prime numbers , finding out is a hard problem.

In order to convince you that factoring a large number say

digits is hard, your first programming assignment that will be out this monday asks you to try and write a factoring routine that given a number finds a prime factor of . You can use any method to do so.

Combinatorially Hard Problems

There are problems in CS which do not have any known algorithms. The class of problems is called NP standing for Non-Deterministic Polynomial Time.

Claim Factoring a number

is an example of a hard problem.

Naive Algorithm

int factor[int n]{
   int i;
   for [i = 0; i < n;++i]
      if [Divides[i,n]] return i;

   return NO_FACTOR;
}

Time taken to factor by best known algorithm is roughly

. However, does that preclude a clever and faster algorithm?

The best known factoring algorithm is the general number field sieve. Even though it is worst case exponential, it has been used to factor large number of upto a

decimal digits.

What problem is RSA based on?

What is RSA used for?

What is RSA algorithm and how it works?

Which of the following is disadvantage of the RSA algorithm?