Security News > 2023 > January > RSA crypto cracked? Or perhaps not!

Without meeting up first to agree on a secret encryption key.

Very simply put, RSA has not one key, like a traditional door lock, but two different keys, one for locking the door and the other for unlocking it.

You designate one of them as your "Public key", which you share with the world, and you keep the other as your "Private key".

The big deal is that RSA introduced a two-key system where one key can't be worked out from the other, in contrast to the traditional one-key system, with the same key to lock and unlock your secrets, that had been in use for centuries.

Even though there are alternatives to RSA these days which let you have smaller public and private keys, and which are based on algorithms that run faster, RSA is still widely used, and there's still a lot of potentially crackable data sitting around in archives, logfiles and network captures that was protected by RSA when it was transmitted.

In RSA, everyone knows the number you get when you multiply those numbers together, but only the person who originally came up with the starting numbers knows how the product was created - the factors together essentially form their private key.

News URL

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2023/01/06/rsa-crypto-cracked-or-perhaps-not/