A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems

Rivest, R. L., Shamir, A., & Adleman, L. (1978). A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems. ACM, 21(2), 120-126.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1978

Volume

21

Issue

2

Pages

120-126

DOI

10.1145/359340.359342

DOI registrant

Association for Computing Machinery

Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/359340.359342

Cited from

computer_science, engineering_design, information_theory, physics, statistics_experimental_design, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

10 citations across 10 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Capability Separation
  • The forgery-prevention mechanism is the hardness of the underlying trapdoor problem — inverting the signing operation without the private key requires solving a problem believed to be intractable.

    This sourceEstablishes the trapdoor-hardness signature scheme where signing requires the private key but verification uses only the public key.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The paper's own abstract states that signatures cannot be forged and that the system's security rests in part on the difficulty of factoring n; it grounds the frame but hedges with 'in part' and never asserts intractability.

    “Signatures cannot be forged, and a signer cannot later deny the validity of his signature.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Compression

  • This sourceThe RSA public-key cryptosystem. DOI verified.

• Data Integrity
  • Failure mode: integrity protected at one layer but lost at another (verified by app but corrupted in transit; signed at source but corrupted at rest); requires holistic architecture review

    This sourceFirst practical public-key cryptosystem and digital-signature scheme; a signature verifiable by anyone establishes authenticated origin.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    RSA 1978 supplies the app-level digital-signature primitive (a signature verifiable by anyone, unforgeable), but says nothing about integrity lost between layers or about a holistic architecture review.

    “A message can be “signed” using a privately held decryption key. Anyone can verify this signature using the corresponding publicly revealed encryption key. Signatures cannot be forged, and a signer cannot later deny the validity of his signature.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Discrete vs. Continuous (Quantization)

  • This sourceThe RSA public-key cryptosystem over discrete modular arithmetic.

• Measurement Uncertainty and Observational Noise
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Multiplexing
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Redundancy
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Signal Decay and Fadeout
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.

Domain-specific

• Digital signature
  • Take a textbook RSA keypair: primes p = 61 and q = 53 give modulus N = 3233, with public exponent e = 17 and private exponent d = 2753

    This sourceThe RSA construction, in which the private exponent d is the inverse of e modulo (p-1)(q-1), that the worked keypair instantiates.

    Supported in partVerified against the source

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Public-Key Cryptography
  • The security bet is visible: recovering d requires knowing φ(n), which requires factoring n back into 3 × 11 — trivial here, but for a 2048-bit n, computationally infeasible

    This sourceThe original paper states the bet in these terms — 'breaking our system by computing φ(n) is no easier than breaking our system by factoring n', and computing d is itself equivalent to factoring — though its own size recommendation is a modulus of about 200 digits, not 2048 bits.

    Supported in partVerified against the source

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 4 of 10 citations: 4 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:c08036610539 · see in the full table