Cryptography General Interview Question:

What is RSA?

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RSA is a public-key cryptosystem for both encryption and authentication; it was invented in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman [RSA78]. It works as follows: take two large primes, p and q, and find their product n = pq ; n is called the modulus. Choose a number, e, less than n and relatively prime to (p-1)(q-1), which means that e and (p-1)(q-1) have no common factors except 1. Find another number d such that (ed - 1) is divisible by (p-1)(q-1). The values e and d are called the public and private exponents, respectively. The public key is the pair (n,e); the private key is (n,d). The factors p and q maybe kept with the private key, or destroyed.
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