RSA+: An algorithm at least as secure as RSA

The RSA algorithm has been around for nearly five decades and remains one of the most studied public key cryptosystems. Many attempts have been made to break it or improve it and questions remain about the equivalence of the strength of its security to well known hard problems in computational number theory. In this note we propose a modified version which we call RSA+ which is at least as secure as RSA and show that breaking RSA+ is probably computationally equivalent to factoring $n$, the public modulus. The motivation came from wanting to obscure the encryption exponent in RSA.