> David Schwartz wrote: > RSA is reversible. I never claimed otherwise. What I said is: > "So /dev/random tries to provide truly random numbers while > /dev/urandom tries to provide only cryptographically-secure > pseudo-random numbers. It's as assured by the implementation as > RSA assures that its operations are irreversible." > > This is precisely correct. In both cases, the operations are > > possible in theory but impossible in practice -- by careful and > > deliberate design.
> David, we count on RSA being reversible, that's how it's > designed. No, we count on it being (for practical purposes) irreversible. That's why you need a different key to decrypt than you used to encrypt. If it was reversible, like say DES, you could decrypt with the same key you encrypted with by simply reversing the process. In principle, you could reverse RSA. You could simply try every possible input (and every possible padding if random padding is used) and find the one that can produce the encrypted output. There are other ways to reverse RSA, but they are all impossible in principle. There are two possibilities: 1) You didn't understand what I meant. 2) You understood what I meant but chose to pretend you didn't. It really looks, at least to me, like '2'. So this is you being rude, not dumb. > One-way > hash functions are presumably irreversible. True, but not relevent. > Your "knowledge" of > cryptography > hasn't improved, you should go home now. At some point, somebody with much more patience than me will explain to you that you haven't any idea what you're talking about. My patient for correcting your lack of understanding and dealing with your intentional offensiveness is running out. I'm going to try not to respond to your for a few hours in the hopes that some such person will explain these things such that you can understand them. DS ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org Development Mailing List [email protected] Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
