2026-10-21 04:56 UTC
Fun fact: most implementations actually always use 65537 as the public key (17 was more common earlier, but rare now). It makes computations easier and faster, and doesn’t affect security much as long as you pick a hard-to-guess private key. The modulus is the thing that varies in public certificates.
Replies (1)
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@zener_diode@feddit.org 2026-10-21 05:30
This is only partially true. RSA public keys consist of two parts: The exponent e, which is usually 65537, for the reasons you described. The modulus n, the product of the two primes used for generating an RSA keypair. If the public key were always completely the same, then there would be no point in making different private keys.