[80392] in Cypherpunks
Re: Public Key Break Paper
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Gutmann)
Tue May 20 10:10:03 1997
From: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net, hal@rain.org
X-Charge-To: pgut001
Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 01:34:32 (NZST)
Reply-To: pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
>John Young, <jya@pipeline.com>, writes:
>>In early April we posted a message which referred to William H. Payne's paper
>>"Public Key Cryptography is Easy to Break."
>
>First, it is not a general attack on public key cryptography, but rather it is
>a specific method for attacking RSA.
>
>Second, I remember seeing this algorithm discussed on sci.crypt in the past,
>probably in 1996.
There was also a response/rebuttal to this paper in RSA's Ciphertext
newsletter, Vol.2, No.1 (Summer 1994), p.9, "Public Key Cryptography is Not
Easy to Break" which shows that it's not nearly as easy as the author of the
original paper thinks.
(I had another look at the unbalanced RSA proposal in the Autumn 1995
CryptoBytes as I was trying to find the above article, did anyone ever do
anything with unbalanced RSA or was it just left as a curiosity?).
Peter.
