[Cryptography] Standard exponents in RSA

[Jerry Leichter]

On Oct 30, 2013, at 2:39 PM, David Mercer <radix42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wonder if any performance obsessed fool has been spotted in the wild using an exponent of zero, which would be the RSA version of ROT-13, no?
Actually, that would be 1.

Exponent 0 is the equivalent of using the message itself as its own one-type-encryption pad.  Martin Minow, many years ago, wrote this up with a completely straight face for an April 1 issue of some crypto journal.  All sorts of nice analysis - such as that this was an ideal one-time-pad, as it added exactly as much randomness to each character of plaintext as there was information in that character.  It also had the unique advantage that the output was highly compressible.  (The article was published, and drew a bunch of letters from people who didn't check the date....)
                                                        -- Jerry