PK systems using groups in practice The four  Public-key cryptosystems: RSA, ElGamel, DH, and Rabin (all with others) all require some group operations in an  integer field or multiplication group of some residue classes. When it comes to encrypting blocks of bits in binary how are these public key cryptosystems performed ? Are byte blocks just converted to base 10 and the encryption is perform on each byte? However results of RSA are much longer than a byte each.
They are used to encrypt symmetric keys. ​ No.