October 30, 2011

Your public key, please

Question: where oh where can you read about large primes and the "p" language in the same essay?

Answer: My new Mint column. On air last Friday October 28.

I need to tell you that reliable sources tell me that this is the first piece of writing in human history that makes mention of Skipjack, Ramdulari and Shamir. A fact of which I am inordinately proud.

On that dubious note ... Check Your Public Key, Please.

And as ever, your comments welcome.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for writing about this interesting concept - and the idea of asymmetry. A more intuitive example would have helped. Maybe we can ask RSID for his expose on this perhaps using quantum encryption methods. Or failing that, the wikipedia entry on this one is quite good.

Ravi Lobo said...

I wish, I had come across this article when I was researching on this subject. Sometime back, my team was working on encryption; and we were interested to understand how RSA encryption works. I was given the task to come up with a presentation. I did a lot of research, and a lot of time to understand, what is mentioned in layman’s terms in this article.

What is interesting for me is, the whole RSA business counts on the fact that factoring large prime numbers takes a huge amount of time. I guess, the fastest computer takes about 7 months to crack a number generated by two 150 digit prime numbers. In future, If we somehow find a solution to factoring these numbers faster, the whole RSA thing falls apart.

Anyway, I was searching for top Indian bloggers—looking for creative writing—when I came across this article. It’s a very good article. Thank you.