RSA is a common encryption algorithm that I wanted to understand. Bruce Schneier's excellent Applied Cryptography gives a good explanation but I found a few steps missing. Building on his derivation, I am going flesh it out.
What you need to know
Vocabulary
- Relatively prime (or mutually prime or coprime): two integers are relatively prime when their only common divisor is 1.
- Congruent: if two integers are have the same value when mod-ed with a third integer, they are congruent.
There is a lot of modulus arithmetic in cryptography and the notation looks like this:
a ≡ b (mod c)
This should not be read in the fashion of a programmer, like a = b mod c (or a = b % c in most languages). Rather, the mod applies to the whole equation so you should read it more like:
(a ≡ b) (mod c)
Modulus Arithmetic Formulas
You also need to know some formulas.
[f1] a p - 1 ≡ 1 (mod p) iff p is prime
This is Fermat's little theorem and the best proof I found is here.
General Maths Formulas
As any school child can tell you:
[f2] abc = (ab)c
and:
[f3] ab + c = ab ac
Also, the result of a mod is just the remainder of a division so it should be obvious:
[f4] a mod b = c ⇔ a = kb + c
where k is just some integer.
Choose two large prime numbers, p and q. Let n be the product of the two.
[d1] n = pq
Why they must be prime will become apparent but it involves [f1] above.
Choose any integer e that is relatively prime to n.
Then, calculate d such that:
(d2) ed ≡ 1 (mod ((p-1)(q-1)))
And that's it. Numbers n an e make the public key and d is the private key.
Now, let's take a message, m. If it's too big, we can break it down and if it's too small we can pad it. But that's not of interest at the moment, so let's just say m is a number we want to encrypt.
Encryption looks like this:
[d3] c ≡ me (mod n)
where c is the encrypted result.
Decryption looks like this:
[d4] m ≡ cd (mod n)
Easy, right?
Yes, but why does it work?
Why is equation [d4] true?
Ok, substitute c in [d4] with c in [d3] and use [f2] to trivially simplify:
[d5] m ≡ med (mod n)
now substitute [d1] into this:
[d6] m ≡ med (mod pq)
Now, re-express [d2] in the format of [f4]:
[d7] ed = k ((p-1)(q-1) + 1
and substitute [d7] for ed in [d6]:
[d8] m ≡ m(k(p-1)(q-1) + 1) (mod pq)
Using [f3], this is the same as:
[d9] m ≡ m . m k(p-1)(q-1) (mod pq)
which, because of f3 is the same as:
[d10] m ≡ m . mk(p-1) m(q-1) (mod pq)
Now, let's invoke [f1] for (q-1):
[d11] m ≡ m . (mq-1)k m(p-1) (mod pq)
≡ m . 1k m(p-1) (mod pq)
≡ m . m(p-1) (mod pq)
and again for (p-1):
[d12] m ≡ m (mod pq)
which is obviously true, so what we started with [d4] must also be true.
No comments:
Post a Comment