Screen shot of start up state. A public and private key
are randomly generated the instruction "Enter plain text here."
You may use that very sentence as the plain text to be encoded,
or you may type your own in. Pressing the little screw head button
to the left deletes the current plain text.
Plain text and cipher text may be entered by typing into the corresponding entry windows
or they may be loaded in from files by using the pulldown File menu.
There are 5 numbers that are important in the RSA
protocol, e, d, p, q, and n.
d is the private key. There other may be be viewed by pressing the corresponding
buttons at the bottom left. This shot shows the result of
presing the e key.
The RSA GUI operates in 4 modes chosen by the pull down menu on top.
Choosing a mode fires up the action appropriate to the mode. Pressing the Go
key while already in the mode does the same. This shot shows the result of pressing the
Go key while in encode mode. The cipher window fills up
with ciphertext, the appropriate encoding for the current plain text using
the current public key.
Hitting carriage return with the cursor in the plaintext
entry window turns the plain text into an integer,
the first step in the encoding process, since encoding
involves doing some modular arithmetic.
This shot illustrates the use
of the verify button while in signature mode. This verifies
that the signature belongs to the plain text by using the public key
decode the text in the cipher window (which is where the signature
shows up) and mkaing sure it matches the hash of the plain text.
This shot shows the Key verification window. Hitting carriage return
while the cursor is in in either the public key or private key window brings up
the key verification window.
What shows up when you choose "Help" from
the pulldown Help menu on the upper right.
More Help.