With the increasing computing power available to even casual users, the security-conscious have had to move on to increasingly robust encryption, lest they find their information vulnerable to brute-force attacks. The latest milestone to fall is 768-bit RSA; in a paper posted on a cryptography preprint server, academic researchers have now announced that they factored one of these keys in early December.
Most modern cryptography relies on single large numbers that are the product of two primes. If you know the numbers, it's relatively easy to encrypt and decrypt data; if you don't, finding the numbers by brute force is a big computational challenge. But this challenge gets easier every year as processor speed and efficiency increase, making "secure" a bit of a moving target. The paper describes how the process was done with commodity hardware, albeit lots of it.
768-bit RSA no longer safe
Posted on Saturday, January 09 2010 @ 2:25 CET by Thomas De MaesschalckARS Technica reports security researchers have cracked 768-bit RSA security. People are recommended to use 1024-bit RSA, it will probably take a few years until this one is cracked as well.
