Cryptographer's Anthem Lyrics Copyright 1995 Stephen Savitzky. CC by-nc-sa/4.0 To the tune of ``To Anacreon in Heaven'' Oh, say, PGP, and RSA public key Cryptosystems are simple, with primes $q$ and $p$; Call the product of one less than each of them $k$ I pick $d$ and $e$, whose product is $1\bmod k$. Now I just publish $d$, and the product $qp$, You raise $d$ to the power of message block $b$; Take that modulo $pq$ and send it to me. And I'll use it as the exponent of private key $e$. Now this program can fit into three lines of code, Using perl and dc, though the logic's distorted. Cryptographic machines are a weapon of war, And the government says they must not be exported. Make a barcoded card, or if you are a bard run the code through a modem, it's not very hard. Now, if I were being mean I'd stick some modem tones in here Then this song would be a munition, its music you could never take From the land of the free, and the home of the brave. The description of the RSA public key crpytography algorithm is mathematically accurate; though it's worth noting that any practical implementation will do the exponentiation and modules in a single operation. Perhaps the only obscure point occurs when specifying that $de \equiv 1 \bmod (p-1)(q-1)$. The twisted phraseology that defines $k$ as $(p-1)(q-1)$ is particularly kludgy, but what the hell, it scans. Online: http://Steve.Savitzky.net/Songs/crypto/lyrics.txt Automatically generated with flktran from ../Lyrics/crypto.flk.