Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The End of Encryption?

Posted by michael on from the doom-and-gloom dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The encryption algorithms that make virtually all electronic commerce possible work only because certain mathematical problems are very, very hard to solve. But some mathematicians are trying to prove that there's really no difference between 'hard' and 'not hard' problems--known in the math biz as P and NP. In an article on TechnologyReview.com, Simson Garfinkel spells out the real-world consequences of this mathematical conundrum."

2 of 633 comments (clear)

  1. Easy killer... by danielrm26 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is really quite simple - the type of machine that can render Prime-based and Discrete Log-based encryption "useless" has not been invented yet. Furthermore, as the article points out, most (including Adelman) belive it'll be a long time before one is.

    The problem (P vs. NP) is still just as difficult, and we aren't really much closer to solving it than 10 or 20 years ago.

    --
    dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
  2. All he does is explain P and NP by GillBates0 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    and ponders over whether the recent MD5 news from the Mathematics conference (in an earlier /. story today) will lead to any discoveries that may help answer whether P=NP.

    Ignoring the fact that the answer to P?=NP has little to do with breaking encryption for a moment, even if an NP computer is conceived and developed, it'll just lay down a *huge* plethora of computing possibilities at our disposal, including new encryption techniques.

    Encryption cannot die, algorithms can.

    --
    An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam