RSA is the most widespread and used public key algorithm. Its security is based on the difficulty of factoring large integers. The algorithm has withstood attacks for more than 30 years, and it is therefore considered reasonably secure for new designs.
The algorithm can be used for both confidentiality (encryption) and authentication (digital signature). It is worth noting that signing and decryption are significantly slower than verification and encryption.
The cryptographic strength is primarily linked to the length of the RSA modulus n. In 2017, a sufficient length is deemed to be 2048 bits. For more information, see the most recent ECRYPT report.
Both RSA ciphertexts and RSA signatures are as large as the RSA modulus n (256 bytes if n is 2048 bit long).
The module Crypto.PublicKey.RSA provides facilities for generating new RSA keys, reconstructing them from known components, exporting them, and importing them.
As an example, this is how you generate a new RSA key pair, save it in a file called mykey.pem, and then read it back:
>>> from Crypto.PublicKey import RSA
>>>
>>> key = RSA.generate(2048)
>>> f = open('mykey.pem','wb')
>>> f.write(key.export_key('PEM'))
>>> f.close()
...
>>> f = open('mykey.pem','r')
>>> key = RSA.import_key(f.read())Crypto.PublicKey.RSA