RSA Gradually Leaves The Stage After More Than 40 Years As A Leader — And It’s Its Friend (TLS) That Is Pushing It Off

Introduction

Like a piece of duck tape holding together a running machine, cryptography is fixing many of the problems that we have created within our digital world. But it also has a much greater role— to build a better world. Once we fix the running machine, we must build a better machine, and which doesn’t need duck tape anymore.

The world of cryptography seems to be getting near to a point that it is picking its favouriates. For symmetric (secret) key we have AES. In hashing methods it is SHA-256 and SHA-3 (Keccak) that are winning. And, for public key, the only method in town just now for new applications is elliptic curve. All that could change, of course, with the advent of quantum computers, but, for now, a new world is being built with these methods, and they are all working seamlessly to build a new world.

And so public key methods are left with two main functions: signing for transactions/proving identity — where the private key is used to encrypt a hashed value of an entity and the public key then verifies it — and in key exchange. RSA plays a part in both of these, and where we often see our digital certificates containing RSA keys. But, in key exchange, it is getting wiped…