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diff --git a/doc/intro.rst b/doc/intro.rst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e689bde --- /dev/null +++ b/doc/intro.rst @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +Introduction & history +====================== + +Python-RSA's history starts in 2006. As a student assignment for the +University of Amsterdam we wrote a RSA implementation. We chose Python +for various reasons; one of the most important reasons was the +`unlimited precision integer`_ support. + +.. _`unlimited precision integer`: + https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#numeric-types-int-float-complex + +It started out as just a module for calculating large primes, and RSA +encryption, decryption, signing and verification using those large +numbers. It also included generating public and private keys. There +was no functionality for working with byte sequences (such as files) +yet. + +Version 1.0 did include support for byte sequences, but quite clunky, +mostly because it didn't support 0-bytes and thus was unsuitable for +binary messages. + +Version 2.0 introduced a lot of improvements by Barry Mead, but still +wasn't compatible with other RSA implementations and used no random +padding. + +Version 3.0 introduced PKCS#1 v1.5 functionality, which resulted in +compatibility with OpenSSL and many others implementing the same +standard. Random padding was introduced that considerably increased +security, which also resulted in the ability to encrypt and decrypt +binary messages. + +Key generation was also improved in version 3.0, ensuring that you +really get the number of bits you asked for. At the same time key +generation speed was greatly improved. The ability to save and load +public and private keys in PEM and DER format as also added. + + + |