I don't know how familiar you are with RSA public key encryption, but it doesn't sound like you're *too* familiar with it. So here's how it works.

To communicate with another party using encrypted messages, you need two keys: a public key and a private key. Say you're sending a message to someone: you have this person's public key, but only he knows his private key. That means that, if the message is intercepted, only he can decrypt the message. Make sense?

So: the basic idea behind RSA public key encryption is that you know someone's public key, and you encrypt your message using that key. In Crypt::RSA, this would be done by using the Crypt::RSA->encrypt method, and the Key object would be the user's public key. When the other person receives your encrypted message, he decrypts it with his private key. On his end this would be done by using Crypt::RSA->decrypt, and the Key object would be his *private key*.

That's a very important point to make, because you seem to be passing what you think is a public key to the decrypt method, which expects a private key.

The reason this all works is because, when you generate RSA public and private keys, you first generate two very large primes, p and q. These are *private*, because from these primes you can derive any of the other key values, including the private key value. A private key object is really made up of d, the private key integer (derived from p and q); and n, the RSA modulus, which is the product of p and q.

What does this mean? It means that you better have both n and d if you expect to decrypt a message encrypted by someone's public key. Because the actual decryption is, in a nutshell,

    M = c ^ d mod n
[download]

where M is the plaintext message and c is the encrypted message.

Here's another description of how the algorithm works.

So in your case, what you're getting is the encrypted message. Right? So you need to decrypt it using a private key. If you have both d and n values, you can construct a private key like this:

    my $key = Crypt::RSA::Key::Private->new;
    $key->n($n);
    $key->d($d);
[download]

Then use $key as the Key argument to decrypt.

The problem in your case seems to be that you only have the public key. Granted I don't know exactly the details of your situation, but it would *seem* to me that if you don't have a private key, you'll have trouble decrypting the message. But then again, as I said, I don't know all of the details of your situation.

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