Jim choate says:
I hope not. If such a thing existed (if I understand your description correctly) RSA could be cracked by a binary search of keyspace. The search would be O(log(n)), meaning it would be directly linear with the number of bits in the key.
Exactly.
If you (or anyone else comes across anything that even looks remotely interesting would appreciate knowing about it).
I could believe some sort of amazing mathematical breakthrough that produced a factoring algorithm that was polynomial in N. The notion that one will show up thats not merely polynomial but actually logarithmic in N is, I would say, in the "beyond pipe dream" state. I might believe something like that showing up someday -- stranger things have happened -- but I have an incredible amount of trouble believing that one exists now and has merely been overlooked by people smart enough to find an amazing result and too stupid to know what their result implied. Perry