Photo by Zé Ferrari Careto on Unsplash

Our Cybersecurity Foundation Is Crumbling?

Goodbye RSA or Work-in-progress or An Overstated Claim?

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I am so lucky to work in an industry with so many amazing people. One of the greats is Claus P. Schnorr. He is famous for creating the Schnorr signature, and which allows signers to merge their signatures together, and then for the resultant signature to be easily checked against one public key. But, he continues to make advances in the field of cryptography, and his latest paper could blow a hole in RSA [here]:

The quote from the Cryptology ePrint Archive of the paper says “The destroyes [sic] the RSA cryptosystem”:

The strength of the RSA method is in the difficulty in factorising a modulus (N) to its prime number factors. In previous work the number field sieve or quadratic sieve methods have been found to be the best at factoring the module, but Claus has used a lattice-based factoring approach, and has found considerable speed-ups. At present, the limit of factorizing is around 250 digits…

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Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.