Privacy/security issue. Lawrence Kam needs to upgrade his hacking PC.
Will any of us be safe, after that?
For Personal Use Only
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
nytimes.com
May 2, 1999
Israeli Scientist Reports Discovery of
Advance in Code Breaking
By JOHN MARKOFF
An Israeli computer scientist is expected to shake up the world of
cryptography this week when he introduces a design for a device
that could quickly unscramble computer-generated codes that until now
have been considered secure enough for financial and government
communications.
In a paper to be presented Tuesday in Prague, the computer scientist,
Adi Shamir, one of the world's foremost cryptographers, will describe a
machine, not yet built, that could vastly improve the ability of code
breakers to decipher codes thought to be unbreakable in practical terms.
They are used to protect everything from financial transactions on the
Internet to account balances stored in so-called smart cards.
Shamir's idea would combine existing
technology into a special computer that
could be built for a reasonable cost, said
several experts who have seen the paper.
It is scheduled to be presented at an annual
meeting of the International Association for
Cryptographic Research, which begins on
Monday.
The name of Mr. Shamir, a computer
scientist at Weizmann Institute of Science
in Rehovoth, Israel, is the "S" in R. S. A.,
the encryption design that has become the
international standard for secure transmissions. He is a co-inventor of
R.S.A. -- with Ronald Rivest of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern
California.
R.S.A. is known as public-key cryptography. In this system, a person
has a public key and a private key. The public key is used to scramble a
message and may be used by anyone, so it can, even should, be made
public. But the private key that is needed to unscramble the message
must be kept secret by the person who holds it.
R.S.A., like many public-key systems, is based on the fact that it is
immensely difficult and time-consuming for even the most powerful
computers to factor large numbers. But Mr. Shamir's machine would
make factoring numbers as long as about 150 digits much easier, thus
making it much simpler to reveal messages scrambled with public-key
encryption methods.
A number of advances in factoring have been made in the last five years.
But most of them are the result of applying brute force to the problem.
When R.S.A. was created in 1977, Mr. Shamir and his colleagues
challenged anyone to break the code. Employing 1970's technology, they
said, a cryptographer would need 40 quadrillion years to factor a public
key, and they predicted that even with anticipated advances in computer
science and mathematics, no one would be able to break the code until
well into the next century.
In fact, a message the trio had encoded with a 129-digit key successfully
withstood attack for only 17 years. It was factored by an international
team of researchers in 1994.
Using Mr. Shamir's machine, cracking the 140-digit number would be
reduced to the difficulty of cracking a key about 80 digits long --
relatively easy by today's standards.
Researchers said that if his machine worked it would mean that
cryptographic systems with keys of 512 bits or less -- that is, keys less
than about 150 digits long -- would be vulnerable in the future, an
exposure that would have seemed unthinkable only five years ago. The
longer 1,024-bit keys that are available today would not be vulnerable at
present.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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