Hi all,

I have been reading up on security and cryptography lately. I *think*
I understand the different terms and concepts pretty well (gone
through the .Net Security and Cryptography by Peter Thorsteinson so
many times it is breaking apart). But I think I have some serious
difficulty trying to translate what I understand into code in .Net.

As an exercise, I am trying to use RSA to asymmetrically encrypt a
piece of plain text. But for the life of me I can't find the proper
syntax to do it. Or should I say there seem to be so many syntax I
don't know which to use. For example, the easiest one the I can do is:

           RSACryptoServiceProvider rsa = receiverCert.PublicKey.Key
as RSACryptoServiceProvider;
           byte[] cipheredKey = rsa.Encrypt(sessionKey, true);

Given that I have a certificate to use that seems to be the right
approach.

But when I flip through MSDN, they are using the RSAParameters to
store the key. From the code sample I can see the
RSAParameters.Modulus stores the public key. But it also seems to
require a RSAParameters.Exponent value.

What is this exponent value? I can't find any mention of this in any
of the materials that I can find on or off line.

Can somebody help explain this?

Much appreciated.