Cryptographic techniques

The public key cryptosystem published by Diffie and Hellman in 1976 is still of great interest today. Of the public key systems that have been proposed the RSA scheme of Rivest, Shamir and Adelman is of most current interest. We shall briefly describe this system (more can be found in references 2 and 7) and then describe a method to obtain suitable primes for use in the scheme.