You pick two huge prime numbers "p" and "q." Multiply them to get "n = p*q." Next, you pick a small public exponent "e" which is the "encryption exponent" and a specially crafted inverse of "e" called "d" as the "decryption exponent." You then make "n" and "e" public and keep "d" as secret as you possibly can and then throw away "p" and "q" (or keep them as secret as "d"). It's really important to remember that "e" and "d" are inverses of each other.

Now, if you have some message, you just need to interpret its bytes as a number "M." If you want to "encrypt" a message to create a "ciphertext", you'd calculate:

C ≡ M^e (mod n)

This means that you multiply "M" by itself "e" times. The "mod n" means that we only take the remainder (e.g. "modulus") when dividing by "n." For example, 11 AM + 3 hours ≡ 2 (PM) (mod 12 hours). The recipient knows "d" which allows them to invert the message to recover the original message:

C^d ≡ (M^e)^d ≡ M^e*d ≡ M¹ ≡ M (mod n)

Just as interesting is that the person with "d" can "sign" a document by raising a message "M" to the "d" exponent:

M^d ≡ S (mod n)

This works because "signer" makes public "S", "M", "e", and "n." Anyone can verify the signature "S" with a simple calculation:

S^e ≡ (M^d)^e ≡ M^d*e ≡ M^e*d ≡ M¹ ≡ M (mod n)

Public key cryptography algorithms like RSA are often called "asymmetric" algorithms because the encryption key (in our case, "e") is not equal to (e.g. "symmetric" with) the decryption key "d". Reducing everything "mod n" makes it impossible to use the easy techniques that we're used to such as normal logarithms. The magic of RSA works because you can calculate/encrypt C ≡ M^e (mod n) very quickly, but it is really hard to calculate/decrypt C^d ≡ M (mod n) without knowing "d." As we saw earlier, "d" is derived from factoring "n" back to its "p" and "q", which is a tough problem.

Class Loading for Shared Classes

The classes and libraries stored under APP-INF/classes and APP-INF/lib are available to all modules in the Enterprise Application. The application classloader always attempts to resolve class requests by first looking in APP-INF/classes, then APP-INF/lib.