A huge cryptographic breakthrough in the late 1970s, the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) method is the example of public key cryptography. See RSA and cryptography. To encrypt a message before ...

Such one-way functions, of which this is perhaps the simplest example, are at the bottom of all public-key encryption. They make asymmetric ciphers possible. In the real world, public-key ...

Yeah, it’s bad. If public-key encryption were suddenly broken without a replacement, digital security would be severely compromised. For example, websites use public-key encryption to maintain ...

Let's make this more concrete with an example. Take the prime numbers 13 and 7. Their product gives us our maximum value of 91. Let's take our public encryption key to be the number 5. Then using ...