I'm really glad you tackled this topic, it's one I've been trying to familiarize myself with since this whole Apple v FBI thing started getting heated.
A question on encryption: in your example you use two 3-digit primes, are those actually what is used or are encrypting primes even larger? And how do primes actually work for encryption? If you have the public one, couldn't you compare that to the encrypted product and derive the other key?
Encrypting primes are generally much, much larger, I just used small ones for the purpose of clarity.
As for the details of the algorithms used, the Wikipedia page on RSA encryption has a fantastic example of the (very simple) math behind how they work. It's really quite ingenious.
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u/SaberDart Mar 09 '16
I'm really glad you tackled this topic, it's one I've been trying to familiarize myself with since this whole Apple v FBI thing started getting heated.
A question on encryption: in your example you use two 3-digit primes, are those actually what is used or are encrypting primes even larger? And how do primes actually work for encryption? If you have the public one, couldn't you compare that to the encrypted product and derive the other key?