Public-key Cryptography: Theory and Practice

4.2. The Problems at a Glance

Let us first introduce the intractable problems of cryptology. In the rest of this chapter, we describe some known methods to solve these problems.

The integer factorization problem (IFP) is perhaps the most studied one in the lot. We know that is a unique factorization domain (UFD) (Definition 2.25, p 40), that is, given a natural number n there are (pairwise distinct) primes (unique up to rearrangement) such that for some . Broadly speaking, the IFP is the determination of these p_i and α_i from the knowledge of ...