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<< Max Upset by My War Alliance Doubts | Main | The Muddled Election >> November 04, 2002Is Internet Encryption DoomedIn the how-cool-math-has-real-implications, an Indian mathematician in August solved one of the blockbuster problems of mathematics-- how to determine if any number, howere large, is a prime number. The problem is that encryption is based on the intractability of dealing with large prime numbers, so many worry that the next step will be, as this article indicates, the ability to break Internet encryption. Just something to worry about as you hand your credit card over the Internet :) Posted by Nathan at November 4, 2002 10:02 AM Related posts:
Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsI think that it's premature to talk about the death of the Internet. The researchers at IIT have not solved a blockbuster problem of mathematics--it's not the Riemann hypothesis, after all--but they did come up with a way to make certain what had been done probabilistically in practice. Even if their work makes it easier to factor primes, it will certainly make it easier to FIND primes. Public-key cryptography depends not on the length of the primes being multiplied together, but merely on the assumption that factoring is much harder than finding primes. So far, that's still true. Posted by: Tim Francis-Wright at November 4, 2002 10:57 AM Post a comment
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