The keys, please ... (RSA)

  • Your secret key is a pair of big prime numbers
  • Your public key is the even bigger composite number that's the product of these primes

  • (The actual encryption/decryption function is a bunch of hocus-pocus derived from Euler's theorem)

  • If you could find the prime factors of the public key, you could break the cipher ... but we don't know how!
  • Builds upon years of work in the theory of computation

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