In article <1.5.4.32.19970513194224.00928884@pop.pipeline.com>, John Young <jya@pipeline.com> wrote:

In early April we posted a message which referred to William H. Payne's paper "Public Key Cryptography is Easy to Break."

Mr. Payne has provided the 1990 5-page draft paper along with other documents, which we've added to the file at:

http://jya.com/snlhit.htm

Thanks for posting. I just took a brief look at it, (thanks for forwarding, Lucky), and it's pure crap-ola. [ ObTechnicalTrashing: the least x such that 2^x = 1 mod n is very likely to be of order n, so 2^x (not modulo!) will be a x-bit integer, and he ends up computing 2^x without doing any reductions, so the work factor of his method is at least order n. Finding a prime factor by exhaustive search (try 2, 3, 5, 7, ...) would be more efficient... Sigh. ]