Three major public key cryptosystems

Question 1

RSA

Answer 1

• most famous public key crypto system
• developed by Rivest, Shamir, Adleman
• depends on the difficulty of factoring the product of prime numbers

Question 2

El Gamal

Answer 2

• extension of Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm
• depends on modular arithmetic
• less common than RSA in the last several years

Question 3

Elliptic Curve

Answer 3

• depends on elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem

- provides more security than other algorithms (when both are used with keys of same length)