RSA Totally Explained

Everything about Rsa totally explained

In cryptography, RSA is an algorithm for public-key cryptography. It was the first algorithm known to be suitable for signing as well as encryption, and one of the first great advances in public key cryptography. RSA is widely used in electronic commerce protocols, and is believed to be secure given sufficiently long keys and the use of up-to-date implementations.

History

The algorithm was publicly described in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman at MIT; the letters RSA are the initials of their surnames. Clifford Cocks, a British mathematician working for the UK intelligence agency GCHQ, described an equivalent system in an internal document in 1973, but given the relatively expensive computers needed to implement it at the time, it was mostly considered a curiosity and, as far as is publicly known, was never deployed. His discovery, however, wasn't revealed until 1997 due to its top-secret classification, and Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman devised RSA independently of Cocks' work. MIT was granted for a "Cryptographic communications system and method" that used the algorithm in 1983. The patent expired on 21 September 2000. Since a paper describing the algorithm had been published in August 1977,

Steps 4 and 5 can be performed with the extended Euclidean algorithm; see modular arithmetic.
The public key consists of the modulus

n,

and the public (or encryption) exponent

e,

.
The private key consists of the modulus

n,

and the private (or decryption) exponent

d,

which must be kept secret.

For efficiency a different form of the private key can be stored:

$p,$ and $q,$ : the primes from the key generation,
$dmod (p - 1),$ and $dmod(q - 1),$ ,
$q^.$ Because of this multiplicative property a chosen-ciphertext attack is possible. E.g. an attacker, who wants to know the decryption of a ciphertext c=m^e mod n may ask the holder of the secret key to decrypt an unsuspicious-looking ciphertext $c' = c r^emod n$ for some value r chosen by the attacker. Because of the multiplicative property $c'$ is the encryption of $mr mod n$ . Hence, if the attacker is successful with the attack, he'll learn $mr mod n$ from which he can derive the message m by multiplying mr with the modular inverse of r modulo n.

To avoid these problems, practical RSA implementations typically embed some form of structured, randomized padding into the value m before encrypting it. This padding ensures that m doesn't fall into the range of insecure plaintexts, and that a given message, once padded, will encrypt to one of a large number of different possible ciphertexts.
Standards such as PKCS#1 have been carefully designed to securely pad messages prior to RSA encryption. Because these schemes pad the plaintext m with some number of additional bits, the size of the un-padded message M must be somewhat smaller. RSA padding schemes must be carefully designed so as to prevent sophisticated attacks which may be facilitated by a predictable message structure. Early versions of the PKCS#1 standard (up to version 1.5) used a construction that turned RSA into a semantically secure encryption scheme. This version was later found vulnerable to a practical adaptive chosen ciphertext attack. Later versions of the standard include Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP), which prevents these attacks. The PKCS#1 standard also incorporates processing schemes designed to provide additional security for RSA signatures, for example, the Probabilistic Signature Scheme for RSA (RSA-PSS).

Signing messages

Suppose Alice uses Bob's public key to send him an encrypted message. In the message, she can claim to be Alice but Bob has no way of verifying that the message was actually from Alice since anyone can use Bob's public key to send him encrypted messages. So, in order to verify the origin of a message, RSA can also be used to sign a message.
Suppose Alice wishes to send a signed message to Bob. She can use her own private key to do so. She produces a hash value of the message, raises it to the power of d mod n (as she does when decrypting a message), and attaches it as a "signature" to the message. When Bob receives the signed message, he uses the same hash algorithm in conjunction with Alice's public key. He raises the signature to the power of e mod n (as he does when encrypting a message), and compares the resulting hash value with the message's actual hash value. If the two agree, he knows that the author of the message was in possession of Alice's secret key, and that the message hasn't been tampered with since.
Note that secure padding schemes such as RSA-PSS are as essential for the security of message signing as they're for message encryption, and that the same key should never be used for both encryption and signing purposes.

Security

The security of the RSA cryptosystem is based on two mathematical problems: the problem of factoring large numbers and the RSA problem. Full decryption of an RSA ciphertext is thought to be infeasible on the assumption that both of these problems are hard, for example, no efficient algorithm exists for solving them. Providing security against partial decryption may require the addition of a secure padding scheme.
The RSA problem is defined as the task of taking eth roots modulo a composite n: recovering a value m such that c=m^e mod n, where (n, e) is an RSA public key and c is an RSA ciphertext. Currently the most promising approach to solving the RSA problem is to factor the modulus n. With the ability to recover prime factors, an attacker can compute the secret exponent d from a public key (n, e), then decrypt c using the standard procedure. To accomplish this, an attacker factors n into p and q, and computes (p-1)(q-1) which allows the determination of d from e. No polynomial-time method for factoring large integers on a classical computer has yet been found, but it hasn't been proven that none exists. See integer factorization for a discussion of this problem. As of 2005, the largest number factored by a general-purpose factoring algorithm was 663 bits long (see RSA-200), using a state-of-the-art distributed implementation. RSA keys are typically 1024–2048 bits long. Some experts believe that 1024-bit keys may become breakable in the near term (though this is disputed); few see any way that 4096-bit keys could be broken in the foreseeable future. Therefore, it's generally presumed that RSA is secure if n is sufficiently large. If n is 256 bits or shorter, it can be factored in a few hours on a personal computer, using software already freely available. Keys of 512 bits (or less) have been shown to be practically breakable in 1999 when RSA-155 was factored by using several hundred computers. A theoretical hardware device named TWIRL and described by Shamir and Tromer in 2003 called into question the security of 1024 bit keys. It is currently recommended that n be at least 2048 bits long.
In 1994, Peter Shor published Shor's algorithm, showing that a quantum computer could in principle perform the factorization in polynomial time. However, quantum computation is still in the early stages of development and may never prove to be practical. � See also: RSA Factoring Challenge, Integer factorization records

Practical considerations

Key generation

Finding the large primes p and q is usually done by testing random numbers of the right size with probabilistic primality tests which quickly eliminate virtually all non-primes. p and q shouldn't be 'too close', lest the Fermat factorization for n be successful, if p-q, for instance is less than 2n^1/4 (which for even small 1024-bit values of n is 3x10⁷⁷) solving for p and q is trivial. Furthermore, if either p-1 or q-1 has only small prime factors, n can be factored quickly by Pollard's p − 1 algorithm, and these values of p or q should therefore be discarded as well.
It is important that the secret key d be large enough. Michael J. Wiener showed that if p is between q and 2q (which is quite typical) and d < n^1/4/3, then d can be computed efficiently from n and e. There is no known attack against small public exponents such as e=3, provided that proper padding is used. However, when no padding is used or when the padding is improperly implemented then small public exponents have a greater risk of leading to an attack, such as for example the unpadded plaintext vulnerability listed above. 65537 is a commonly used value for e. This value can be regarded as a compromise between avoiding potential small exponent attacks and still allowing efficient encryptions (or signature verification). The NIST Special Publication on Computer Security (SP 800-78 Rev 1 of August 2007) doesn't allow public exponents e smaller than 65537, but doesn't state a reason for this restriction.

Speed

RSA is much slower than DES and other symmetric cryptosystems. In practice, Bob typically encrypts a secret message with a symmetric algorithm, encrypts the (comparatively short) symmetric key with RSA, and transmits both the RSA-encrypted symmetric key and the symmetrically-encrypted message to Alice.
This procedure raises additional security issues. For instance, it's of utmost importance to use a strong random number generator for the symmetric key, because otherwise Eve (an eavesdropper wanting to see what was sent) could bypass RSA by guessing the symmetric key.

Key distribution

As with all ciphers, how RSA public keys are distributed is important to security. Key distribution must be secured against a man-in-the-middle attack. Suppose Eve has some way to give Bob arbitrary keys and make him believe they belong to Alice. Suppose further that Eve can intercept transmissions between Alice and Bob. Eve sends Bob her own public key, which Bob believes to be Alice's. Eve can then intercept any ciphertext sent by Bob, decrypt it with her own secret key, keep a copy of the message, encrypt the message with Alice's public key, and send the new ciphertext to Alice. In principle, neither Alice nor Bob would be able to detect Eve's presence. Defenses against such attacks are often based on digital certificates or other components of a public key infrastructure.

Timing attacks

Kocher described a new attack on RSA in 1995: if the attacker Eve knows Alice's hardware in sufficient detail and is able to measure the decryption times for several known ciphertexts, she can deduce the decryption key d quickly. This attack can also be applied against the RSA signature scheme. In 2003, Boneh and Brumley demonstrated a more practical attack capable of recovering RSA factorizations over a network connection (for example, from a Secure Socket Layer (SSL)-enabled webserver). This attack takes advantage of information leaked by the Chinese remainder theorem optimization used by many RSA implementations.
One way to thwart these attacks is to ensure that the decryption operation takes a constant amount of time for every ciphertext. However, this approach can significantly reduce performance. Instead, most RSA implementations use an alternate technique known as cryptographic blinding. RSA blinding makes use of the multiplicative property of RSA. Instead of computing c^d mod n, Alice first chooses a secret random value r and computes (r^ec)^d mod n. The result of this computation is r m mod n and so the effect of r can be removed by multiplying by its inverse. A new value of r is chosen for each ciphertext. With blinding applied, the decryption time is no longer correlated to the value of the input ciphertext and so the timing attack fails.

Adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks

In 1998, Daniel Bleichenbacher described the first practical adaptive chosen ciphertext attack, against RSA-encrypted messages using the PKCS #1 v1 padding scheme (a padding scheme randomizes and adds structure to an RSA-encrypted message, so it's possible to determine whether a decrypted message is valid.) Due to flaws with the PKCS #1 scheme, Bleichenbacher was able to mount a practical attack against RSA implementations of the Secure Socket Layer protocol, and to recover session keys. As a result of this work, cryptographers now recommend the use of provably secure padding schemes such as Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding, and RSA Laboratories has released new versions of PKCS #1 that are not vulnerable to these attacks.

Branch prediction analysis (BPA) attacks

Many processors use a branch predictor to determine whether a conditional branch in the instruction flow of a program is likely to be taken or not. Usually these processors also implement simultaneous multithreading (SMT). Branch prediction analysis attacks use a spy process to discover (statistically) the private key when processed with these processors.
Simple Branch Prediction Analysis (SBPA) claims to improve BPA in a non-statistical way. In their paper, "On the Power of Simple Branch Prediction Analysis", the authors of SBPA (Onur Aciicmez and Cetin Kaya Koc) claim to have discovered 508 out of 512 bits of an RSA key in 10 iterations.