For RSA and most encryption schemes that involve primes, the steps are:
1. Pick two very large prime numbers - the trick is ensuring (with some confidence) that they are prime by using Miller-Rabin or some such algorithm. 2. Compute the product of the two primes. 3. Publish the product without the two primes - this is one of the keys in RSA.
The strenght of the encryption is the difficultly of factoring the very large (non-prime) number. Until a non-linear factoring technique is developed, such encryption schemes will continue to be viable. I haven't seen yet any real research that quantum computing will be able to do this - but who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
For RSA and most encryption schemes that involve primes, the steps are:
1. Pick two very large prime numbers - the trick is ensuring (with some confidence) that they are prime by using Miller-Rabin or some such algorithm.
2. Compute the product of the two primes.
3. Publish the product without the two primes - this is one of the keys in RSA.
The strenght of the encryption is the difficultly of factoring the very large (non-prime) number. Until a non-linear factoring technique is developed, such encryption schemes will continue to be viable. I haven't seen yet any real research that quantum computing will be able to do this - but who knows.