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SUMS lecture Public Key Encryption Prof. Edward Turner, SUNY Albany November 12, 1999 4 pm - 5 pm, Hylan 1101 Tea from 3 to 4 The making of codes (cryptography) and the breaking of codes (cryptanalysis) have long been sciences that involved serious mathematics. This has become even more true in the last 20 years with the development of Public key encryption. This method permits the receiver of messages to announce publicly how to encrypt messages to him which he can easily decrypt but that others cannot in reasonable time. I will briefly describe some of the encryption procedures that were used historically and highlight their weaknesses, I will then describe in some detail the RSA cryptosystem, the most common of the public key systems now in use. It is a clever application of some basic principles of number theory whose use is made possible by the availability of high speed computing. Of necessity, we will need to consider large prime numbers, like 1000000000000000000000000000000000000003. ('There are 38 zeros).
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