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Check out the new article: Pure implementation of RSA encryption in MQL5.

MQL5 lacks built-in asymmetric cryptography, making secure data exchange over insecure channels like HTTP difficult. This article presents a pure MQL5 implementation of RSA using PKCS#1 v1.5 padding, enabling safe transmission of AES session keys and small data blocks without external libraries. This approach provides HTTPS-like security over standard HTTP and even more, it fills an important gap in secure communication for MQL5 applications.

The name “RSA” comes from the initials of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who introduced the algorithm in 1977 while working at MIT. Their work was the first practical implementation of a public-key cryptosystem based on one-way mathematical functions, turning what had been a theoretical idea into a usable technology. Although the concept of public-key cryptography had been proposed earlier by Diffie and Hellman in 1976, it was the RSA construction that provided a concrete mechanism for secure encryption and digital signatures.

At its core, RSA relies on the mathematical difficulty of factoring large composite numbers — a problem that remains computationally infeasible for sufficiently large key sizes. This property makes RSA a foundational technology in modern cryptography. For decades, it has been used to secure web traffic, authenticate digital documents, exchange keys, and protect sensitive data across countless platforms and protocols.

Today, RSA remains one of the most widely adopted asymmetric encryption algorithms, forming a critical part of standards such as SSL/TLS, PGP, SSH, and many secure communication systems. Despite the emergence of elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) and other modern alternatives, RSA continues to be valued for its simplicity, robustness, and long-established security model.


Author: Vahid Irak