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April 14, 2005
Errors in your manuscript
Brad DeLong makes an important point about the fact that nobody is perfect:My father believes that one should leave typos in one's galleys uncorrected. It is a law of nature that when one opens the printed version the first thing one will see will be a mistake. If you leave the typos alone, the first thing one will see will be a typo. If you correct the typos, the first thing one will see will be a truly horrible and inexcusable substantive error...
Absolutely right. On the other hand, in final review of SSL and TLS, we discovered that I'd claimed that 1 made a good RSA public exponent (it should have been 17). That's one typo I'm glad I fixed.
On the gripping hand, just seven lines later the text says that to do RSA private decryption you compute Ce mod N, which manages to be both a typo and a horrible, inexcusable substantive error.
Posted by ekr at April 14, 2005 9:18 PM | Filed under:
Comments
RSA public exponent of 1 leads to very efficient encryption and decryption.
RSA public exponent of 0 is provably impossible to decrypt!
(Apologies to the presenters from Crypto 2003 rump session).
Posted by: Bob McGrew at April 15, 2005 6:33 PM