I would become a vigilante hacker, blackmailing the worlds most nefarius characters into servitude of myself forcing them to do good. Slowly moving their wealth into my control, then after a decade, cut their heads off.
Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
111–120 of 174 posts
Re: Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
#112Imagine what you would do if you discovered how to factor efficiently? Think carefully. You now how the power to decrypt much of the world's banking and internet traffic and spoof certificates. There are forces in this world that would kill you to have this power. Would you publish your findings for everlasting fame? Would you sell it to the NSA for money (remember you can prove your power without releasing your algo…
Obviously I would publish immediately in as many public forums as I can and wait for the sweet, sweet upvotes, stars, retweets, likes and karma to roll in.
Re: Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
No need to launder, this money would not be illegal. Just convert it and pay your taxes. When you will have to justify your revenues, everybody will have migrated to different cryptography anyway and you will not be in danger any more and you will be able to use this money as you want.
Because there will be fifteen nation-states who want to kidnap you and force you to disclose the algorithm?
Just Tarex teams and Mossad by themselves would be a big threat. NSA has the visibility to de-anonymize even some people on Tor. Most mathematicians aren't exactly computer security geniuses. NSA might not even need to work that hard. Then, they have plenty of partners for grabbing whoever or whatever the target is.
Re: Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
#114Imagine what you would do if you discovered how to factor efficiently? Think carefully. You now how the power to decrypt much of the world's banking and internet traffic and spoof certificates. There are forces in this world that would kill you to have this power. Would you publish your findings for everlasting fame? Would you sell it to the NSA for money (remember you can prove your power without releasing your algo…
Sounds like a great premise for a sci-fi movie.
Re: Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
#115I've heard the following called "Aaronson's trilemma": Either the extended Church-Turing thesis is false, or quantum computers are impossible, or...there exists a classical polynomial factoring algorithm that runs in polynomial time. One of these things must be true, and debates around quantum computing usually focus on the first two. But as argued, we don't have great reasons to believe factoring in polynomial time…
Factoring is one of the few quantum algorithms that is odd man out in terms of noise/implementation/scaling/etc. This should be indicating something about the structure of factoring that we don't understand.
Out of all the "classical" problems that we might find another algorithm for, "factoring" would be my bet for the one that we are missing a better algorithm.
Re: Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sort of statement is exactly why serious people shouldn't take "quantum complexity theory" seriously. The complexity class BQP is bullshit: there are no quantum computers, the end. Feel free to prove me wrong by building one which does useful calculations. No time limit, until you die, in which case "time's up." Edit add for downvoters: the strong Church Turing thesis is also almost certainly, and very obviously…
Which statement are you saying demonstrates why people shouldn't take quantum complexity theory seriously?
BQP doesn't exist: there are no quantum computers. Saying BQP is like saying "magic fairy dust perfect unitary transformers that effectively encode a perfect complex number in the same sense a protractor theoretically can solve NP-complete problems by encoding real numbers."
Re: Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
No need to launder, this money would not be illegal. Just convert it and pay your taxes. When you will have to justify your revenues, everybody will have migrated to different cryptography anyway and you will not be in danger any more and you will be able to use this money as you want.
Because there will be fifteen nation-states who want to kidnap you and force you to disclose the algorithm?
You don't have to keep it private after 2/3 months. Just make the algorithm public and no one will kidnap you.
Re: Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
#118Imagine what you would do if you discovered how to factor efficiently? Think carefully. You now how the power to decrypt much of the world's banking and internet traffic and spoof certificates. There are forces in this world that would kill you to have this power. Would you publish your findings for everlasting fame? Would you sell it to the NSA for money (remember you can prove your power without releasing your algo…
Obviously I would publish immediately in as many public forums as I can and wait for the sweet, sweet upvotes, stars, retweets, likes and karma to roll in.
Someone else could use the published work to roll back your upvotes.
Re: Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't really need someone else to check if you've made a mistake. So long as you can multiply reliably you can just factor the largest one of the RSA prize semiprimes and then check that you did indeed produce some factors. I think my plan would just be to publish that factorisation anonymously (being super paranoid to avoid being traced) and then wait however long was necessary before publishing the algorithm.
But what if you find an algorithm with a low asymptotic complexity, but with such a high constant factor that it could not be put into practical use? We would still want to move away from RSA (since constant factors can often be improved), but there would be no way to actually use the algorithm in its current form.
In that case, there is no immediate threat when publishing. Unless you area afraid someone else can improve on the constant factor, this won't break crypto.
Re: Factoring may be easier than we think (2016)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once asked this a cryptographer. His response was that he would do the following things (if I remember correctly): * Discuss the result with a few cryptographers he trusts, to check whether he didn't make a mistake and to make sure he's not the only one who knows about it. * Write a paper. Put in all kinds of silly things, because it will get published anyway. * Publish proof of having found the algorithm, together…
Is there any alternative to factoring for asymmetric cryptography? I was under the impression even elliptic curves are based on factoring (though not a cryptographer myself). If that’s the case we would have to live in a world with no asymmetric encryption. That would be interesting.
I believe elliptic curves aren't broken by factoring. You might be confused with shor's algorithm. That is a quantum-algorithm that breaks both elliptic curves and RSA.
It doesn't break elliptic curve crypto by factoring numbers. Instead, it breaks them by solving the discrete logarithm problem.