Implementing SSL/TLS Using Cryptography and PKI

CHAPTER 3

Secure Key Exchange over an Insecure Medium with Public Key Cryptography

Chapter 2 examined symmetric or private/shared key algorithms. The fundamental challenge in applying private key algorithms is keeping the private key private — or, to put it another way, exchanging keys without letting an interested eavesdropper see them. This may seem like an insoluble problem; you can't establish keys over an insecure channel, and you can't establish a secure channel without keys. Perhaps surprisingly, there is a solution: public-key cryptography. With public-key algorithms, there are actually two keys, which are mathematically related such that an encrypt operation performed with one can only be decrypted using the other one. Furthermore, to be usable in a cryptography setting, it must be impossible, or at least mathematically infeasible, to compute one from the other after the fact. By far the most common public-key algorithm is the RSA algorithm, named after its inventors Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman. You may recall Rivest from Chapter 2 as the inventor of RC4.

You may notice a difference in the technical approach between this chapter and the last. Whereas symmetric/shared key algorithms are based on shifting and XORing bits, asymmetric/public key algorithms are based entirely on properties of natural numbers. Whereas symmetric encryption algorithms aim to be as complex as their designers can get away with while still operating reasonably quickly, public-key ...