RSA Cracking Claims!

Well, Robert Grant (CEO of Crown Sterling) has been presenting on cryptography again, and it has kept Twitter ablaze with this comments:

For me, I kinda like his presentations. They are fun, and where he — at least — tries to explain some difficult concepts in an engaging way, but sadly some of the claims are not quite up to current standards. While you can see he doesn’t have a core depth of knowledge, and often gets things mixed up, he at least tries to explain the importance of public key encryption. But, when he outlines that “A times B equals C” is a discrete log problem, you see that there’s a bit of a lack of depth in some of the knowledge.

What I like in his presentation ithat he is correct in identifying that many industry people just don’t understand even the basics of the methods used in encryption. As this is a foundation element of good cybersecurity, we must thus worry about the state of the industry. As for the scientific claims in the talk, I leave it to you to make up your own mind.

It is Bruce Schneier who really highlights the weaknesses of the claims in this presentation which:

decrypts two 256-bit asymmetric public keys in approximately 50 seconds from a standard laptop computer