John Young, <jya@pipeline.com>, writes:

...

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

First, it is not a general attack on public key cryptography, but rather it is a specific method for attacking RSA.

Second, I remember seeing this algorithm discussed on sci.crypt in the past, probably in 1996.

There was also a response/rebuttal to this paper in RSA's Ciphertext newsletter, Vol.2, No.1 (Summer 1994), p.9, "Public Key Cryptography is Not Easy to Break" which shows that it's not nearly as easy as the author of the original paper thinks. (I had another look at the unbalanced RSA proposal in the Autumn 1995 CryptoBytes as I was trying to find the above article, did anyone ever do anything with unbalanced RSA or was it just left as a curiosity?). Peter.