this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
32 points (79.6% liked)
Security
5005 readers
1 users here now
Confidentiality Integrity Availability
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The actual math is way beyond me, but the algorithm is "one way" - it exploits the fact that given two prime numbers (ie, the private key) it is trivial to multiply them together, but if you only know the result (ie, the public key) it is computationally very expensive to determine the original prime factors. If you pick big enough numbers, it becomes effectively impossible to undo the multiplication