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Major Vulnerability May Bring Down Public Key Encryption
What’s the shortest book in the world?
“The Even Prime Numbers”
This book basically has one page which says the number “2”, followed by “The End”. Well, researchers in the US have made the book a whole lot shorter with the discovery of the weaknesses in using “2” as a prime number. This has the opportunity to compromise public key encryption on many devices, and ultimately to expose the data in virtually every network connection.
Their discovery is that “2” isn’t actually a prime number.
Leading cryptographers and security engineers are now looking rather embarrassed as they had just “thought” that two was prime, as this is what they had been told, and they took at as a fact. One senior security architect working on the core of the Internet outlined:
We just took our Professor’s advice that 2 was a prime number, and we didn’t check … and now we are in trouble! All of our systems are at threat, so I’ve just resigned from my post. Bye!
Prime numbers are used extensively in public-key encryption key, and typically where we take two prime numbers and multiply them together to get a modulus (N). This modulus is often difficult to factorize as large numbers are used. The well-known RSA method, for example, is built on this…
