3 ms·
I am not too happy with the timeline of the article. It seems to conflate RSA and DH exchanges, which are foundamentally different, although can (and are) used
by dullgiulio 9y ago
I am not too happy with the timeline of the article. It seems to conflate RSA and DH exchanges, which are foundamentally different, although can (and are) used together.
If one doesn't know this already, it seems to imply that DH exchange led to inventing RSA... Mathematically and also practically they are independent.
Edit: To clairfy further: RSA and DH exchanges are not even that commonly used together as they serve two different purposes.
With RSA you have a key-pair (public and private) and you can write something with someone's public key that only the owner of a private key can read. This is called asymmetric encryption.
With a DH exchange you can establish a shared secred (usually, a shared key) on an untrusted channel without needing any previously shared data. The shared key can then be used to encypt further communication with symmetric encyption.
- kelnage 9y agoBut in protocols such as TLS or PGP, the computational requirements of RSA means it is often just used to encrypt a symmetric key, which is then shared with the recipient, in a very similar way to how DH is used to establish a shared secret. I wouldn't say that conflating them in this way is so unrealistic.
- tptacek 9y agoThe most important and widely used cryptosystem on the Internet uses them together: DH to derive a key, RSA to sign the DH parameters.