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by user5994461 1947 days ago
RSA is extremely simple, it's just multiplications and powers. It can be reasonably explained to high school students. The tooling is mature and keys are trivial to generate safely with a openssl command.

EdDSA is another level entirely. I don't know how you can recommend elliptic curve cryptography with a straight face if you think RSA is hard.

P.S. It's a myth that EdDSA is faster. This depends on operation (signing vs verification) and key size.

1 comments

Elliptic curves are also quite simple. Computing a public key boils down to point addition with a modulus.

The private key is a byte string and the quality of it only depends on the random generator. It’s trivially fast to generate 32 bytes of decent quality random numbers these days. There are many insecure rsa generation methods with weak criteria. Too many are fossilized in libraries and crypto cores. Rsa also has half a dozen padding schemes and most are now considered weak or vulnerable.

EC is generally considered much stronger for a much smaller key size.