Signal's president vows to reject UK law on message scanning before encryption

Re:Signal's president vows to reject UK law on message scann... by Canada on Saturday July 15, 2023 @12:26PM (#36738377)

Did it really invent RSA, such that there was any actual capability of performing asymmetric encryption or signatures?

I thought it was more like, one guy there had a pretty good idea that it was possible that he wrote about, but never developed it into anything practical.

Am I mistaken, and the whole working system was described?

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Re:Signal's president vows to reject UK law on message scann... by throw0101a on Saturday July 15, 2023 @12:31PM (#36738438)

A PDF scan of the paper is now available, so you can judge for yourself:

* https://web.archive.org/web/20180928121748/https://www.gchq....

IANAM (mathematician), but the formulae look RSA-like, though given the compute at the time, it may have been (too) expensive to try implementing.

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Re:Signal's president vows to reject UK law on message scann... by derefr on Saturday July 15, 2023 @12:50PM (#36738699)

The "pretty good idea" (Ellis' "non-secret encryption") was published about in 1969. Clifford Cocks found a workable algorithm for it — using prime factorization as the trapdoor function — in 1973. No cryptosystem was ever developed around the idea, by Cocks or GCHQ in general; they just sat on it as a classified secret. Then, in 1977, RSA was independently invented and published as both an algorithm and a full cryptosystem.

I would definitely say that Cocks and RSA both independently discovered what we refer to as the RSA algorithm. We should maybe call it the Cocks–RSA algorithm.

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