Public-Key Cryptography

• Idea due to Diffie & Hellman 1976 (indep Merkle)

• First realization 1977: Rivest, Shamir, Adleman.

• Since then, many others.

• Security rests on different computational problems.

  • RSA -- factoring large integers (??)
  • McEliecee -- decoding linear code (NP-complete)
  • El Gamal -- discrete logarithm problem (??)
  • Chor-Rivest -- knapsack (NP-complete)
  • ….

• Public-key cryptosystem can never provide unconditional security.

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