Re:Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU
by wizzwizz4 on Thursday February 02, 2023 @10:25AM
(#34627790)
It's still hard. I couldn't go out and make a gun right now. Meanwhile, many children have invented their own codes and ciphers by age 10, armed only with paper and pencil and the desire to keep a secret. A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that "hey, maybe asymmetric encryption is possible" and the knowledge that (F_p \ {0}, ×) is a group.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU
by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Thursday February 02, 2023 @12:24PM
(#34629908)
> A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that
And I bet the NSA would break your homegrown RSA built with your basic understanding of group theory in a few minutes. RSA is extremely subtle to implement correctly and if you get it wrong you can easily leak everything.
Re:Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU
by wizzwizz4 on Friday February 03, 2023 @07:37AM
(#34640285)
Unlikely. The hard part of implementing RSA is making it secure against timing attacks, but I doubt my desk calculator and I will be particularly vulnerable to that. It's not like I'm going to suffer from the ECB penguin issue: MY MSGZ R SMOL and my key size is large enough to avoid that.
RSA really is very simple group theory. It was independently invented at least three times, as I recall.