Attacks on RSA

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Revision as of 00:42, 14 April 2009 by imported>Sandy Harris (→‎TWIRL)
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A number of methods have been proposed for attacking the RSA cryptosystem. This article describes them.

Any efficient solution to the integer factorisation problem would break RSA; see the RSA article for discussion. The difficulty with that approach is that no efficient solution is known. Cracking a large (say 1024 bits or more) RSA key with current factoring algorithms is not practical, even with massive parallelism.

Weiner attack

Michael Weiner proposed an attack [1] based on continued fractions which is effective if the exponent in the secret key is small.

TWIRL

The Weizman Instiute Relation Locator [1], developed by Adi Shamir (The 'S' in RSA) and Evan Tromer, is a machine designed to speed up the seiving step in the number field seive technique for integer factorisation.

  1. {{cite paper | title=Cryptanalysis of short RSA secret exponents | author=Wiener, M.J. | journal= IEEE Transactions on Information Theory | volume= 36 | issue= 3 | date=May 1990 | page=553 - 558