[80038] in Cypherpunks
Re: Public Key Break Paper
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Wagner)
Wed May 14 05:54:55 1997
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: daw@cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner)
Date: 13 May 1997 15:12:07 -0700
Reply-To: daw@cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner)
In article <1.5.4.32.19970513194224.00928884@pop.pipeline.com>,
John Young <jya@pipeline.com> wrote:
> In early April we posted a message which referred to
> William H. Payne's paper "Public Key Cryptography is
> Easy to Break."
>
> Mr. Payne has provided the 1990 5-page draft paper
> along with other documents, which we've added to the file
> at:
>
> http://jya.com/snlhit.htm
Thanks for posting.
I just took a brief look at it, (thanks for forwarding, Lucky),
and it's pure crap-ola.
[ ObTechnicalTrashing: the least x such that 2^x = 1 mod n is
very likely to be of order n, so 2^x (not modulo!) will be a
x-bit integer, and he ends up computing 2^x without doing any
reductions, so the work factor of his method is at least order
n. Finding a prime factor by exhaustive search (try 2, 3, 5,
7, ...) would be more efficient... Sigh. ]
