1 Introduction & history 2 ====================== 3 4 Python-RSA's history starts in 2006. As a student assignment for the 5 University of Amsterdam we wrote a RSA implementation. We chose Python 6 for various reasons; one of the most important reasons was the 7 `unlimited precision integer`_ support. 8 9 .. _`unlimited precision integer`: 10 https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#numeric-types-int-float-complex 11 12 It started out as just a module for calculating large primes, and RSA 13 encryption, decryption, signing and verification using those large 14 numbers. It also included generating public and private keys. There 15 was no functionality for working with byte sequences (such as files) 16 yet. 17 18 Version 1.0 did include support for byte sequences, but quite clunky, 19 mostly because it didn't support 0-bytes and thus was unsuitable for 20 binary messages. 21 22 Version 2.0 introduced a lot of improvements by Barry Mead, but still 23 wasn't compatible with other RSA implementations and used no random 24 padding. 25 26 Version 3.0 introduced PKCS#1 v1.5 functionality, which resulted in 27 compatibility with OpenSSL and many others implementing the same 28 standard. Random padding was introduced that considerably increased 29 security, which also resulted in the ability to encrypt and decrypt 30 binary messages. 31 32 Key generation was also improved in version 3.0, ensuring that you 33 really get the number of bits you asked for. At the same time key 34 generation speed was greatly improved. The ability to save and load 35 public and private keys in PEM and DER format as also added. 36 37 38 39
