From: Dan Fabulich (dfabulich@warpmail.net)
Date: Fri Aug 30 2002 - 19:45:14 MDT
Brett Paatsch wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Have been a bit busy to read recent posts but a quick scan of subject
> heading suggest this article "Simple Recipe Creates Acid Test for Primes"
> (Science: Vol 297. 16 Aug 2002, p1105) may not yet have been picked up.
Everything the body of your message said about the article is true, but
the subject line is false. It's a test to see whether or not a number is
prime, not for finding its prime factors. Knowing that a number is not
prime doesn't tell you what its factors are.
There's a big difference: this new algorithm is still no use in beating
RSA, because the interesting numbers are KNOWN to be composite (the
product of two primes, large ones in this case). A test for primality is
no use in this situation, except for the purposes of generating new keys
quickly.
> "Cryptographers might have more mixed feelings. They rely on now-difficult
> number theoretic computations, such as factoring large numbers, to safeguard
> cryptosystems that have become the mainstays of the computer security
> business. If primality can be vanquished so easily, who's to say that a
> polynomial-time algorithm for factoring isn't just around a corner?"
This is still a worry, as much as it always was. But we don't neet to
throw out our public keys just yet.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:34 MST