> -----Original Message-----
> From: cFischer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Monday, May 01, 2000 7:32 PM
>
> what is all this math-tender for in the first place? are these
> calculations that a public-key cryptosystem has to be capable of? i dont
> run openssl (or ssleay or rsa-c) at the moment, and i didn't bother to get
> the sources, so i can't check how things are done. can you answer this
> question?
Yes and no: yes and no.
Or to expand a bit: Current popular computer-based public-key cryptosystems
(RSA and ECC, with a nod to El Gamal and various others in the wings) are
based on "difficult" mathematical problems. Given the capabilities of
computers now and in the forseeable future, making the problems sufficiently
difficult to provide what most people agree appears to be adequate security
requires using pretty big numbers in those problems. "Pretty big" here is
too big for the native arithmetic functions of conventional CPUs to perform
directly, so crypto packages need support routines that perform "big number"
arithmetic.
There are ways to implement public-key cryptosystems without big-number
mathematics, but they're not generally suitable for use with computers.
Some are only applicable to pen-and-paper crypto (which could be easily
cracked with computers - a trivial example is just scaling RSA, say, down to
numbers people can easily work with).
> or, rather than that, is there a place on the 'net where i can
> get a decent "tutorial for the uneducated one" on crypto-math?
Try the sci.crypt FAQs (from eg. <URL:http://www.faqs.org./>, particularly
parts 4 (Mathematical Cryptography) and 6 (Public Key Cryptography), for
starters. There are many good web sites that discuss this sort of thing;
the FAQs have pointers. Reading sci.crypt can also be enlightening, though
it's a high-traffic group and the postings range from non- to highly
technical, and from very informative to completely misleading.
If you find yourself interested in the subject, the standard text for
computer implementation of contemporary crypto is Schneier's _Applied
Cryptography_.
Michael Wojcik [EMAIL PROTECTED]
MERANT
Department of English, Miami University
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