Math Advance Suggest RSA Encryption Could Fall Within 5 Years

holy_calamity writes "The two encryption systems used to secure the most important connections and digital files could become useless within years, reports MIT Technology Review, due to progress towards solving the discrete logarithm problem. Both RSA and Diffie-Hellman encryption rely on there being no efficient algorithm for that problem, but French math professor Antoine Joux has published two papers in the last six months that suggest one could soon be found. Security researchers that noticed Joux's work recommend companies large and small begin planning to move to elliptic curve cryptography, something the NSA has said is best practice for years. Unfortunately, key patents for implementing elliptic curve cryptography are controlled by BlackBerry."

Comments

We need to keep this secret

[BenSchuarmer]

otherwise hackers will use it to mess up the internets.

Re:Why not go back to original RSA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why elliptic curves when we can go back to good old fashioned original RSA that uses prime number factoring as the problem? No patent nonsense to worry about there.

We used up all the good prime numbers during the Internet boom years under Clinton.

Re:Ah what does it matter...

[Quasimodem]

You pay a fraction of your income to have someone watching you all the time.

It's a great deal if you're an exhibitionist!

Re:The real math secret

[Mal-2]

1 + 1 = 3
This is a correct answer. Do you know why?

It was calculated in Excel?