<story><title>Breakthrough a step toward revealing hidden structure of prime numbers</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/sensational-breakthrough-marks-step-toward-revealing-hidden-structure-prime-numbers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EMIRELADERO</author><text>This got me thinking.&lt;p&gt;Imagine this discovery led to a larger breakthrough on prime numbers that allowed easy factorization of large integers and effectively rendered public key cryptography such as RSA ineffective overnight, by allowing anyone with a consumer-grade CPU to crack any production-size key.&lt;p&gt;Does the industry have DR plans for this scenario? Can the big players quickly switch to a different, unbroken encryption system? While it would probably be a heavenly day for jailbreakers, console modders and other &amp;quot;device freedom&amp;quot; types generally, the overall impact would be disastrous and incalculable.&lt;p&gt;Does the industry simply not consider &amp;quot;sudden number theory breakthrough&amp;quot; a possible event?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnotherGoodName</author><text>That happened many many times over with rsa!&lt;p&gt;The us government used to restrict export of long rsa keys. At one point much of the world was using 128bit rsa keys but Dixon method had everyone scrambling to use 512bit keys. Then the special number field drive had us all scrambling to use 1024bit keys and the general number field seive again had us scrambling to get to 2048bit keys.l and that really wasn’t that long ago relatively speaking.&lt;p&gt;Check out rsa encryption hardware from the 80s. They are really proud of some of the hardware that can do 512bits! (Useless today)&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;people.csail.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;rivest&amp;#x2F;pubs&amp;#x2F;pubs&amp;#x2F;Riv84.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;people.csail.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;rivest&amp;#x2F;pubs&amp;#x2F;pubs&amp;#x2F;Riv84.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The special and general number field seize complexity statements are a few constants in difference. Look at those constants. Do they seem to be some root limit to you? Is it really that unlikely that there’s not a way to reduce those further making even 2048bit keys useless?&lt;p&gt;You don’t need to ask “what would happen if RSA broke” because those of us who have been through this many times now can straight up tell you. You’ll be scrambling to once more bump up the key size and you’ll be auditing all the potential data leaked.</text></comment>
<story><title>Breakthrough a step toward revealing hidden structure of prime numbers</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/article/sensational-breakthrough-marks-step-toward-revealing-hidden-structure-prime-numbers</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>EMIRELADERO</author><text>This got me thinking.&lt;p&gt;Imagine this discovery led to a larger breakthrough on prime numbers that allowed easy factorization of large integers and effectively rendered public key cryptography such as RSA ineffective overnight, by allowing anyone with a consumer-grade CPU to crack any production-size key.&lt;p&gt;Does the industry have DR plans for this scenario? Can the big players quickly switch to a different, unbroken encryption system? While it would probably be a heavenly day for jailbreakers, console modders and other &amp;quot;device freedom&amp;quot; types generally, the overall impact would be disastrous and incalculable.&lt;p&gt;Does the industry simply not consider &amp;quot;sudden number theory breakthrough&amp;quot; a possible event?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scrapheap</author><text>If someone found a way to easily factorize large integers easily on consumer grade hardware then it would be very painful as RSA is one of the big public key algorithms.&lt;p&gt;Before you start worrying about it though consider that RSA has held up for 47 years of active cryptanalysis so far - during which time many alternative algorithms have been suggested as being superior, only to be broken a short time later.&lt;p&gt;Also the push to switch to Elliptic-Curve algorithms has been more down to them being easier for computers to use to encrypt&amp;#x2F;decrypt data.&lt;p&gt;Personally if I had to bet on which public key algorithm will still be around in   10 years time then I&amp;#x27;d put my money on RSA.</text></comment>