The Real Cryptography Behind a Fictional Quantum Machine
Most of the cryptography around that machine is not invented. Inventing cryptography would have been harder than looking it up, and considerably less interesting. Below are seven details a reader could reasonably assume were fiction, each traced to the standard, paper, or document it came from. Every source is named precisely enough to check.
Everything discussed here appears in the first eight chapters of thirty. There are no plot spoilers past the opening act.
1. The padding, and the number 65537
In chapter one, the API reports the submitted ciphertext as “RSA-4096 with OAEP padding.” A few paragraphs later the protagonist checks his key and notes that “the public exponent was 65537.”
Both are conventional choices. OAEP is Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding, specified as RSAES-OAEP in section 7.1 of RFC 8017, the IETF’s informational republication of PKCS #1 version 2.2 [1]. Bellare and Rogaway introduced it at EUROCRYPT 1994 to...
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