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About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

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Re: About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

#31

Post by [deleted] »

tedunangst wrote: post #16
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #6

I feel like everyone is being quick to write this off as "some random, harmless error", probably because the focus is that RSA is not broken, rather than asking what this was really about. "The only case where this could matter would be a broken implementation of the OpenPGP key protocol that does not check if subkeys really belong to a master key." I'd be curious to explore that further. This kernel developer has be…

If I wanted to poison HPA with a fake key, why would I create a degenerate one? A fake key with strong factors would have gone unnoticed, at least by this analysis.

[deleted]

Re: About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

#32

Post by Dylan16807 »

Adlai wrote: post #17
timothya wrote: post #8

Meanwhile, on the original post, the author is acting like HN was tampering with the ranking of the article because it started doing poorly after people realized that a real key wasn't factored: > "Update II : Amusingly enough, it seems Hacker News hand-diddled their story list to remove this discussion. Way to go Ydumbinator crew!" [0] [0]: http://trilema.com/2015/full-disclosure-4096-rsa-key-in-the-...

It's worth noting that HN does adjust article rankings: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... Compare the gradual slide from the peak of other articles from the same time as the one in question: http://hnrankings.info/9560839,9561606,9561693,9561599,95619... Moderated forums aren't censored, but they do get... moderated. What else did you expect?

Sometimes moderation steps in, but that's not needed most of the time when user flagging exists.

Re: About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

#33

Post by Adlai »

sanswork wrote: post #29
Adlai wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His >50% MPOE[1] stake is at least 1.4 million coins (valuated by the last trade). If you're skeptical of numbers on webpages (c.f. "EmptyGox"), MPEx's trivially traceable addresses[2] currently contain around five thousand coins; tracking down the rest is left as an exercise for the skeptical sleth. [1] http://mpex.ws/?mpsic=S.MPOE [2] https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/MPEx.co

Maybe I'm reading it wrong but according to that there is ~10m shares outstanding at a price of 0.00028btc per share. Doesn't that make it worth around 2800 btc not 2.8m?

We're both wrong. One billion shares, half of which he can't sell:

  CL-USER> (* 1/2 (expt 10 9)
              (parse-float "0.00029087" :type 'rational))
  145435

Re: About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

#34

Post by agroot12 »

acqq wrote: post #4

For anybody who wants to think about how such entry happened, it seems that the difference among the two presented numbers is in exactly 32 bytes (256 bits): 913ff626efddfb f8ae8f1d40da8d13 a90138686884bad1 9db776bb4812f7e3 b2 c37b8cca2eb4ac 1e889d1027bc1ed6 664f3877cd7052c6 db5567a3365cf7e2 c6 starting from the 162nd byte if I counted correctly, which means the first 5 * 32+1 (or 2 * 80+1) bytes are the same, then 3…

The 161 bytes offset might be explained by corruption in an encoded version of the key. 161 bytes in binary data would be ~ 216 chars in base64. With an (unusual) line length of 72 the corruption would start exactly at the 4th line.

But: Mail clients should use 78 chars per text line, and GPG encodes base64 in lines of 64 chars length, so ignore my theory ;-).

Re: About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

#35

Post by chinpokomon »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #6

I feel like everyone is being quick to write this off as "some random, harmless error", probably because the focus is that RSA is not broken, rather than asking what this was really about. "The only case where this could matter would be a broken implementation of the OpenPGP key protocol that does not check if subkeys really belong to a master key." I'd be curious to explore that further. This kernel developer has be…

At first glance, I thought the keys were the same. I'm undecided if this was deliberate or unintentional. If this was unintentional, perhaps by corruption, how likely would the result generate such an easily factorable key?

Re: About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

#36

Post by Retric »

chinpokomon wrote: post #35
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #6

I feel like everyone is being quick to write this off as "some random, harmless error", probably because the focus is that RSA is not broken, rather than asking what this was really about. "The only case where this could matter would be a broken implementation of the OpenPGP key protocol that does not check if subkeys really belong to a master key." I'd be curious to explore that further. This kernel developer has be…

At first glance, I thought the keys were the same. I'm undecided if this was deliberate or unintentional. If this was unintentional, perhaps by corruption, how likely would the result generate such an easily factorable key?

Random errors likely generate easily factorable keys. Each prime removes 1/N numbers. So 2 removes 1/2 of possible numbers. 3 remove 1/3 of the remaining possible numbers etc. Just 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 remove 80% of possible random numbers.

Re: About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

#37

Post by obituary_latte »

dang wrote: post #28
obituary_latte wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the fuck would this be downvoted? You people sometimes... Edit: further contributing to the discussion, more anonymous downvotes. Great.

Please resist complaining about downvotes, as the site guidelines ask. Most unfairly downvoted comments get corrective upvotes after a while—that's what happened in the GP's case. Comments like this one, though, just add noise.

Fair enough. Apologies.
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