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Piger Fabrica Crypto Flaw Found
What’s the shortest book in the world?
“The Even Prime Numbers”
which 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 weaknesses in using “2” as a prime number, and have stumbled upon a major flaw in the usage of public key encryption on many devices.
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 the number “2” 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!
Prime numbers are used extensively in public-key encryption key, and typically where we take two prime numbers and multiply them together to give a modulus (N). This modulus is often difficult to factorize as large numbers are used.
The usage of 2, though, has been useful in cryptography as it allows mobile devices to support public key calculations. Thus, many smart phone applications thus use this number as intruders just do not check for the number “2” in…
