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nneonneo • yesterday at 3:56 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

“d=4” is a perfectly legal RSA private key. The corresponding public key would probably have a weird e (not 65537, the usual choice), but would otherwise be legal, and could have an arbitrarily large modulus n (thus appearing “secure”).

Note that p,q (the primes you’re thinking of) are not actually required for decryption. They enable you to calculate d, the decryption exponent, and also enable decryption-time optimizations (exponentiation with d_p and d_q followed by CRT recombination), but that’s optional. In fact, p,q can be computed from n, e and d.


Replies

nspaced • yesterday at 8:54 PM

d=4 is not a valid RSA private key. When p and q are prime λ(n) = lcm(p − 1, q − 1) is always even. e must be coprime with λ(n) so it's odd. de ≡ 1 (mod λ(n)) which means that de is 1 + an even number, so d must also always be odd.

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mplewis • yesterday at 6:15 PM

congratulations, you've performed an autopsy on a joke

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