Cryptography and

Network Security
Sixth Edition
by William Stallings
 Chapter 9
Public Key Cryptography and RSA
“Every Egyptian received two names, which
were known respectively as the true name
and the good name, or the great name and
the little name; and while the good or little
name was made public, the true or great
name appears to have been carefully
concealed.”
—The Golden Bough,
Sir James George Frazer
 Misconceptions Concerning
Public-Key Encryption

• Public-key encryption is more secure from

cryptanalysis than symmetric encryption

• Public-key encryption is a general-purpose

technique that has made symmetric encryption
obsolete

• There is a feeling that key distribution is trivial

when using public-key encryption, compared to
the cumbersome handshaking involved with key
distribution centers for symmetric encryption
 Table 9.1
Terminology Related to Asymmetric Encryption

Source: Glossary of Key Information Security Terms, NIST IR 7298 [KISS06]

 Principles of Public-Key
Cryptosystems
• The concept of public-key cryptography evolved from
an attempt to attack two of the most difficult
problems associated with symmetric encryption:
Key distribution
• How to have secure communications in general without having to
trust a KDC with your key

Digital signatures
• How to verify that a message comes intact from the claimed sender

• Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman from Stanford

University achieved a breakthrough in 1976 by coming
up with a method that addressed both problems and
was radically different from all previous approaches
to cryptography
 Public-Key Cryptosystems
• A public-key encryption scheme has six ingredients:

Encryption Decryption
Plaintext Public key Private key Ciphertext
algorithm algorithm

Accepts
The the
readable Performs ciphertext
Used for Used for The
message various and the
encryptio encryptio scrambled
or data transform- matching
n or n or message
that is fed ations on key and
decryptio decryptio produced
into the the produces
n n as output
algorithm plaintext the
as input original
plaintext
 Public-Key
Cryptography
 Table 9.2
Conventional and Public-Key Encryption
Public-Key Cryptosystem: Secrecy
Public-Key Cryptosystem: Authentication
 Public-Key Cryptosystem:
Authentication and Secrecy
Applications for Public-Key
Cryptosystems
• Public-key cryptosystems can be classified into
three categories:
•The sender encrypts a message
Encryption/decryption with the recipient’s public key

•The sender “signs” a message

Digital signature with its private key

•Two sides cooperate to

Key exchange exchange a session key

• Some algorithms are suitable for all three

applications, whereas others can be used only for
one or two
 Table 9.3
Applications for Public-Key Cryptosystems

Table 9.3 Applications for Public-Key Cryptosystems

Public-Key Requirements
• Conditions that these algorithms must fulfill:
• It is computationally easy for a party B to generate a
pair (public-key PUb, private key PRb)
• It is computationally easy for a sender A, knowing the
public key and the message to be encrypted, to
generate the corresponding ciphertext
• It is computationally easy for the receiver B to decrypt
the resulting ciphertext using the private key to recover
the original message
• It is computationally infeasible for an adversary,
knowing the public key, to determine the private key
• It is computationally infeasible for an adversary,
knowing the public key and a ciphertext, to recover the
original message
• The two keys can be applied in either order
Public-Key Requirements
• Need a trap-door one-way function
• A one-way function is one that maps a domain into a range
such that every function value has a unique inverse, with the
condition that the calculation of the function is easy, whereas
the calculation of the inverse is infeasible
• Y = f(X) easy
• X = f–1(Y) infeasible

• A trap-door one-way function is a family of invertible

functions fk, such that
• Y = fk(X) easy, if k and X are known
• X = fk–1(Y) easy, if k and Y are known
• X = fk–1(Y) infeasible, if Y known but k not known

• A practical public-key scheme depends on a suitable trap-

door one-way function
 Public-Key Cryptanalysis
• A public-key encryption scheme is vulnerable to a brute-force
attack
• Countermeasure: use large keys
• Key size must be small enough for practical encryption and
decryption
• Key sizes that have been proposed result in encryption/decryption
speeds that are too slow for general-purpose use
• Public-key encryption is currently confined to key management and
signature applications

• Another form of attack is to find some way to compute the

private key given the public key
• To date it has not been mathematically proven that this form of
attack is infeasible for a particular public-key algorithm

• Finally, there is a probable-message attack

• This attack can be thwarted by appending some random
bits to simple messages
 Rivest-Shamir-Adleman
(RSA) Scheme
• Developed in 1977 at MIT by Ron Rivest, Adi
Shamir & Len Adleman

• Most widely used general-purpose approach

to public-key encryption

• Is a cipher in which the plaintext and

ciphertext are integers between 0 and n – 1 for
some n
• A typical size for n is 1024 bits, or 309 decimal
digits
 RSA Algorithm
• RSA makes use of an expression with exponentials

• Plaintext is encrypted in blocks with each block having a binary

value less than some number n

• Encryption and decryption are of the following form, for some

plaintext block M and ciphertext block C
C = Me mod n
M = Cd mod n = (Me)d mod n = Med mod n

• Both sender and receiver must know the value of n

• The sender knows the value of e, and only the receiver knows the
value of d

• This is a public-key encryption algorithm with a public key of

PU={e,n} and a private key of PR={d,n}
Algorithm Requirements
• For this algorithm to be satisfactory for
public-key encryption, the following
requirements must be met:
1. It is possible to find values of e, d, n
such that Med mod n = M for all M < n

2. It is relatively easy to calculate Me mod

n and Cd mod n for all values of M < n

3. It is infeasible to determine d given e

and n
Example of RSA Algorithm
Exponentiation in Modular
Arithmetic
• Both encryption and decryption in RSA involve
raising an integer to an integer power, mod n

• Can make use of a property of modular

arithmetic:

[(a mod n) x (b mod n)] mod n =(a x b) mod n

• With RSA you are dealing with potentially

large exponents so efficiency of
exponentiation is a consideration
Table 9.4
Efficient Operation Using
the Public Key
• To speed up the operation of the RSA
algorithm using the public key, a specific
choice of e is usually made

• The most common choice is 65537 = (216 + 1)

• Two other popular choices are e=3 and e=17
• Each of these choices has only two 1 bits, so the
number of multiplications required to perform
exponentiation is minimized
• With a very small public key, such as e = 3, RSA
becomes vulnerable to a simple attack
Efficient Operation Using
the Private Key
• Decryption uses exponentiation to power d
• A small value of d is vulnerable to a brute-force
attack and to other forms of cryptanalysis

• Can use the Chinese Remainder Theorem

(CRT) to speed up computation
• The quantities d mod (p – 1) and d mod (q – 1)
can be precalculated
• End result is that the calculation is
approximately four times as fast as evaluating
M = Cd mod n directly
 Key Generation
• Before the application of • Because the value of n = pq
the public-key will be known to any
cryptosystem each potential adversary, primes
participant must must be chosen from a
generate a pair of keys: sufficiently large set
• Determine two prime • The method used for
numbers p and q finding large primes must
• Select either e or d and be reasonably efficient
calculate the other
 Procedure for Picking a
Prime Number
• Pick an odd integer n at random

• Pick an integer a < n at random

• Perform the probabilistic primality test with a

as a parameter. If n fails the test, reject the
value n and go to step 1

• If n has passed a sufficient number of tests,

accept n; otherwise, go to step 2
 The Security of RSA
Brute force
• Involves
Chosen ciphertext trying all Mathematical attacks
attacks possible • There are several
• This type of attack private keys approaches, all
exploits properties equivalent in effort to
of the RSA factoring the product
algorithm of two primes
Five
possible
approaches
to
Hardware fault-based attacking
attack Timing attacks
RSA are:
• This involves inducing • These depend on the
hardware faults in the running time of the
processor that is decryption
generating digital algorithm
signatures
 Factoring Problem
• We can identify three approaches to attacking
RSA mathematically:
• Factor n into its two prime factors. This enables
calculation of ø(n) = (p – 1) x (q – 1), which in
turn enables determination of d = e-1 (mod ø(n))
• Determine ø(n) directly without first
determining p and q. Again this enables
determination of d = e-1 (mod ø(n))
• Determine d directly without first determining
ø(n)
 T
a 9
b .
l 5
e
Table 9.5 Progress in RSA Factorization
MIPS-Years
Needed
to
Factor
 Timing Attacks
• Paul Kocher, a cryptographic consultant,
demonstrated that a snooper can determine a
private key by keeping track of how long a
computer takes to decipher messages
• Are applicable not just to RSA but to other
public-key cryptography systems
• Are alarming for two reasons:
• It comes from a completely unexpected
direction
• It is a ciphertext-only attack
 Countermeasures

Constant Random delay Blinding

exponentiation time •Better performance could •Multiply the ciphertext by
•Ensure that all be achieved by adding a a random number before
exponentiations take the random delay to the performing
same amount of time exponentiation algorithm exponentiation; this
before returning a result; to confuse the timing process prevents the
this is a simple fix but does attack attacker from knowing
degrade performance what ciphertext bits are
being processed inside the
computer and therefore
prevents the bit-by-bit
analysis essential to the
timing attack
 Fault-Based Attack
• An attack on a processor that is generating RSA digital
signatures
• Induces faults in the signature computation by reducing the
power to the processor
• The faults cause the software to produce invalid signatures
which can then be analyzed by the attacker to recover the
private key

• The attack algorithm involves inducing single-bit errors

and observing the results

• While worthy of consideration, this attack does not appear

to be a serious threat to RSA
• It requires that the attacker have physical access to the target
machine and is able to directly control the input power to the
processor
Chosen Ciphertext Attack
(CCA)
• The adversary chooses a number of ciphertexts and is
then given the corresponding plaintexts, decrypted
with the target’s private key
• Thus the adversary could select a plaintext, encrypt it
with the target’s public key, and then be able to get the
plaintext back by having it decrypted with the private
key
• The adversary exploits properties of RSA and selects
blocks of data that, when processed using the target’s
private key, yield information needed for cryptanalysis

• To counter such attacks, RSA Security Inc.

recommends modifying the plaintext using a
procedure known as optimal asymmetric encryption
padding (OAEP)
 Optimal
Asymmetric
Encryption
Padding
(OAEP)
 Summary
• Public-key • The RSA algorithm
cryptosystems
• Description of the
• Applications for public- algorithm
key cryptosystems • Computational
aspects
• Requirements for • Security of RSA
public-key
cryptography

• Public-key cryptanalysis