Security News > 2021 > March > No, RSA Is Not Broken

My understanding is that prior to the publication of "Primes is in P," many workers in the specialized field of complexity theory had formed the opinion that no deterministic polynomial-time algorithm could be found for primality testing.

Colleagues might have looked skeptically at Agrawal for working on the problem of finding such an algorithm.

Wiles kept his desire to prove FLT secret, and didn't do any serious work on it until.

B. Wiles worked on Taniyama-Shimura in total secrecy.

Although Wiles' announcement of a proof was a shock to his profession, his work was taken very seriously, and the necessary experts promptly went to work analyzing his paper statement by statement.

A poll of mathematicians would probably rank RH as the single most important unsolved problem in their discipline, so working on it is a respectable choice; but it has resisted proof for more than 150 years, so unless one is manifestily working on an approach that is both plausible, and not tried before, it's very likely a waste of time.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/no-rsa-is-not-broken.html