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I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

mcpherrin.ca

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Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I imply you did? I simply said I never see a "pro AI" mob, only an "anti AI" mob.

Let's flip it, then Is the "anti AI mob" in the room with us right now? If not, why did you feel the need to lament it?

Busy downvoting their initial comment, apparently.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#53
post #4

Basically 2 days on a consumer GPU to crack a 512 bit cert. The thing is much of the traffic back then did not use ephemeral keys. Most of it wasn't even encrypted at all! But about a decade later, it became normal to encrypt everything. I do wonder which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later when decryption can happen.

> which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later Probably not too many, because anonymous political speech from 10+ years ago isn't that interesting. Punishing people a decade after the fact isn't very effective for anything.

> Punishing people a decade after the fact isn't very effective for anything.

It sends a very clear message: even if it takes a decade, we will find you and punish you.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#54
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back I helped a friend (read: dumped a bunch of compute power into it) brute force the SSL keys for Sega's "Phantasy Star Online" Dreamcast game. They used a similar kind of custom (and flawed) TLS implementation in their game(s) which allowed signing new certificates after brute forcing. The benefit to this is that users can now play these games without needing to burn a new CD with either the SSL certs swap…

For what it's worth, this comment was better than the article... When you outsource to the slop machine, you don't have anything interesting to say (usually).

The slop machine gives answers to your questions. It hallucinates so it's recommended to verify what it says. Shit in, shit out. If you have no idea whatsoever and can't use other sources to verify claims, well, get a different job I guess.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#55
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later Probably not too many, because anonymous political speech from 10+ years ago isn't that interesting. Punishing people a decade after the fact isn't very effective for anything.

Activists 10 years ago are probably still linked to interesting people the government wants to survey though, even if they are maybe less active now

Activists typically aren't secretive about their actions, on the contrary they tend to be as public as they can safely be. The setup though might be, if it's to prepare an event that might be crushed down before it even take place, but then even a day later, not even a decade, to decipher would be too late and thus pointless.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#56
post #7
post #2

The cost per bit is a doubling in time. So factoring a 512 RSA, compared to a 1024 RSA is significantly cheaper. The OP used contemporary hardware to do this. so, we'd have to ask if the orders of magnitude improvement in tech (QC aside) would permit 1024 in tractable time. I tend to no, but I appreciate there are other points of view. And of course, the belief that one day we can apply Shor with success exists. At w…

Doubling per bit is for symmetric encryption, where no attack better than brute force is known. RSA can be attacked using much faster techniques than brute force.

Can you point at some papers or articles that talk about attacks specifically on RSA? I've done a search and have a few references, but I'd be interested to know if you have any particular examples in mind.

I know that factoring (which attacks RSA) is sub-exponential, and I know that implementations of RSA (bad choices of primes, timing attacks, etc) can have weaknesses ... I'm just interested as to whether you have something else in mind.

Thx.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later Probably not too many, because anonymous political speech from 10+ years ago isn't that interesting. Punishing people a decade after the fact isn't very effective for anything.

> Punishing people a decade after the fact isn't very effective for anything. It sends a very clear message: even if it takes a decade, we will find you and punish you.

That’s not a message activists tend to care about though. In places where speech is dangerous enough for this to matter, there are usually far more immediate threats.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#58
Great writeup. The fact that CADO-NFS still takes 32 hours on a 5950X for a 512-bit key that's trivial by today's academic standards really puts into perspective how comically undersized these were even for 1999 — RSA-155 fell that same year. Also love that verifying against real Netscape 4.51 ended up being harder than the factoring itself.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#59
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubling per bit is for symmetric encryption, where no attack better than brute force is known. RSA can be attacked using much faster techniques than brute force.

Can you point at some papers or articles that talk about attacks specifically on RSA? I've done a search and have a few references, but I'd be interested to know if you have any particular examples in mind. I know that factoring (which attacks RSA) is sub-exponential, and I know that implementations of RSA (bad choices of primes, timing attacks, etc) can have weaknesses ... I'm just interested as to whether you have…

I think you're looking for the large formula at the top here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve

Reference to a scientific paper is given: https://www.ams.org/notices/199612/pomerance.pdf

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