It’s Alive! Lattice Cryptography Takes Off To A New Level
It is no monster and is likely to save the Internet from being broken
While he slept on a couch, Ron Rivest had a brainwave for the creation of a trap door function for public key encryption. It was a problem he had continually tried to solve. Could he find a method where a special digital key could be used to provide a trap door in the deciphering process, and where it was extremely difficult to decrypt unless we knew a secret?
RSA is born
And, so, while symmetric key has been since the 1960s, the usage of a public key to encrypt and a private key to decrypt became Ron’s key focus. For this, he continually came up with new methods, but his fellow researchers — Adi Shamir and Len Adleman — always found ways around them. But, with his new method, he had found a mathematical method that would make public key encryption possible.
Overall, he found that he could generate two prime numbers and multiply them together in a public modulus. With this, computers find the task of factorizing large modulus values into factors, a costly process. While computers are built with only a capacity for processing 64-bits at a time, this new method used numbers which were much larger than these small numbers. With the RSA method, he…
