I'm a student new to cryptography and have a fairly straight forward RSA question that I'm struggling to wrap my head around.
"Alice's RSA public key [N:e] is stored in binary as a 16bit integer &: 8bit integer.
What is the maximum number of ASCII letters that can be encrypted at once and sent to Alice if assuming no padding?"
My initial thought was 1 ASCII character at a time because M < N. Therefore it couldn't be 2 characters (2 x 8 bits) because M would = N.
From my understanding of modular arithmetic: 51 mod 5 = 0 But 41 mod 5 = 4
So I kind of understand that if M is equal or greater than N, I will only decrypt an equivalent message but not identical.
Could somebody explain this to me in more detail?