Are public key and private key interchangeable?

Question

On the one hand, I hear people saying that the two keys are totally interchangeable, the first one will decrypt what the second one encrypted. This makes me think that the two keys are interchangeable.

But on the other hand, RSA generated keys appear to have different length, and on another topic encrypting with a private key was called “signing” and was deemed less safe than encrypting with a public key. (2)

On top of that comes the idea that the private key should be kept undisclosed when the public key should be openly distributed in the wild. (3)

I planned to receive data from an unique server, so my idea was to keep a public key on that server to encrypt data, and distribute a private key to all the possible customers, but this goes against (3). Conversely, if I distribute public keys and encrypt my data with the private key, the encryption is less safe according to (2).

Should I distribute a public key and encrypt with a private one to satisfy (2) or the other way around?

NB: in my case, performance is not an issue.

Answer 1

The answer depends on whether you are asking your question out of mathematic curiosity, or for purely practical, cryptographic reasons.

• If you are implementing a crypto system you should never disclose your private key, so in this sense the keys are absolutely not interchangeable. Furthermore, the usage scenario you describe seems like a good match for authentication rather than confidentiality, so the message that is sent by the server to the clients should indeed be signed and not encrypted. If you need confidentiality as well, you need a few more steps in your protocol.

• From a mathematical point of view, the answer is OTOH "yes", presuming you use an internal representation of the private key that only contains the modulus N and the exponent D, and the other exponent E is generated randomly. The formula that describes the relation between the two exponents is 1 = E*D (mod phi(N)), so from a mathematical point of view it doesn't really matter which exponent is which.

But on the other hand, RSA generated keys appear to have different length

If you are using an implementation that produces RSA private keys that are significantly longer than the corresponding public keys, this almost always means the implementation is absolutely not suitable for using public and private keys interchangeably. The difference in length is usually due to a combination of the following:

• The public exponent E is not generated randomly, but is a small, fixed constant, such as 3 or 0x10001. The private exponent D will on the other hand be almost as large as the modulus, so the private key data will be almost twice the size of the public key data. If you only got a RSA private key (N,D), your first guess on the public exponent would be either of the values 3 or 0x10001, and it would be easy the check if the guess is correct. Should you want the keys to be interchangeable, the exponent you pick first has to be picked randomly as an odd integer greater than 1 and less than phi(N) and with no prime factors in common with N or phi(N).
• The private key data includes the factors P,Q of the public modulus N.
• The private key data includes the public exponent E.

Answer 2

Your public key is used to encrypt a message, your private one to decrypt it. Thus with the public key, which you distribute, anyone can encrypt a message safe in the knowledge that only you (or someone with your private key) can decrypt it. To answer your question directly, no they are not interchangeable. You should never distribute your private key.

If you want to share a key with multiple possible customers, then there are really two options. Either you abandon asymmetric cryptography and find a secure way to distribute a symmetric key, for use with something like AES instead of RSA, to each of them, or you ask each of them to generate a key pair and provide you with their public key. Then you can decrypt what comes from the server, and re-encrypt for each customer. The number of customers will help dictate your choice between the two.

Answer 3

public keys encrypt. private keys decrypt. they do not switch around.

What you should be doing to get it right is that each client (customer) has a private/public key pair. When the server needs to send out some data it should request the public key from the client (customer) and use that for encryption. Then the customer (and only the correct customer) will be able to decrypt the information that they recieve (using their closely guarded private key).