About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

Re:About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key by userbinator on Sunday May 17, 2015 @08:47PM (#9562385)

Is there any sort of statistical analyses which could give some idea of whether those bits were generated randomly, by a human, or perhaps came from some other key?

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Re:About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key by acqq on Sunday May 17, 2015 @08:55PM (#9562408)

They are just 256 bits. And if they come from a cypher they certainly can't be distinguished from the pure random bits or from the bits from any other key.

But if they come from some other key unmodified it would be possible to scan for the match, and it's a fast operation, as soon as we have the keys in which we'd like to search.

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Re:About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key by userbinator on Monday May 18, 2015 @02:36AM (#9563081)

I was wondering about the possibility of distinguishing between a human opening a keyfile (I believe they are encoded in base64?) and manually overwriting pieces of it with random rubbish, or something else; humans make very poor RNGs, as anyone who has tried "randomly" mashing a keyboard will notice.

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Re:About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key by obituary_latte on Sunday May 17, 2015 @09:34PM (#9562496)

Why the fuck would this be downvoted? You people sometimes...

Edit: further contributing to the discussion, more anonymous downvotes. Great.

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Re:About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key by dang on Monday May 18, 2015 @12:52AM (#9562917)

Please resist complaining about downvotes, as the site guidelines ask. Most unfairly downvoted comments get corrective upvotes after a while—that's what happened in the GP's case. Comments like this one, though, just add noise.

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Re:About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key by obituary_latte on Monday May 18, 2015 @09:16PM (#9567708)

Fair enough. Apologies.

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