[RSA78] A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems

Authors: Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman | Venue: Communications of the ACM, 1978 | Source

Abstract

An encryption method is presented with the novel property that publicly revealing an encryption key does not thereby reveal the corresponding decryption key. This has two important consequences: (1) Couriers or other secure means are not needed to transmit keys, since a message can be enciphered using an encryption key publicly revealed by the intended recipient. Only he can decipher the message, since only he knows the corresponding decryption key. (2) A message can be “signed” using a privately held decryption key. Anyone can verify this signature using the corresponding publicly revealed encryption key. Signatures cannot be forged, and a signer cannot later deny the validity of his signature. This has obvious applications in “electronic mail” and “electronic funds transfer” systems. A message is encrypted by representing it as a number M, raising M to a publicly specified power e, and then taking the remainder when the result is divided by the publicly specified product, n, of two large secret prime numbers p and q.

BibTeX

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@Article{RivShaAdl78,
  author = {Ronald L. Rivest and Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman},
  title = {A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems},
  pages = {120--126},
  journal = {Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery},
  volume = {21},
  number = {2},
  month = {feb},
  year = {1978},
  doi = {10.1145/359340.359342},
}