An Almost-Secret Algorithm Researchers Used to Break Thousands of RSA Keys

Re:An Almost-Secret Algorithm Researchers Used to Break Thou... by sublupo on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @02:39AM (#18918981)

> The authors hint in a footnote that at the heart of their computation is an asymptotically fast algorithm, allowing them to bring the running time of the computation down to nearly linear; but the actual description of the algorithm is kept a secret from the reader

How could something like that pass peer review? Their claim is effectively unable to be reproduced.

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Re:An Almost-Secret Algorithm Researchers Used to Break Thou... by andreareina on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @09:08PM (#18927682)

If I'm reading the numbers right, even using the slow way you'd expect to break on the order of tens of keys per day. Thus the claim that "two out of every one thousand RSA moduli [...] offer no security" is easily verified. The secret algorithm doesn't compute secret data that can't be verified.

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Re:An Almost-Secret Algorithm Researchers Used to Break Thou... by codezero on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @10:38AM (#18921706)

It’s not clear to me that the journal it was published in is peer reviewed. Not all are.

https://www.springer.com/computer/theoretical+computer+scien...

It’s useful to have such places to publish things, but unfortunate that it’s not clear whether it’s peer reviewed.

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Re:An Almost-Secret Algorithm Researchers Used to Break Thou... by rincebrain on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @12:49PM (#18923026)

A number of CS publications (or non-CS publications with custom software) don't include the source/enough exact parameters/... to reproduce their results.

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Re:An Almost-Secret Algorithm Researchers Used to Break Thou... by ric2b on Wednesday January 16, 2019 @11:19AM (#18922104)

Maybe the reviewers had access.

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