Prime magnitude and keys...a ?

Perry E. Metzger perry at imsi.com
Fri Jun 17 12:06:24 PDT 1994



Jim choate says:
> I am *NOT* talking about factoring anything.

Who cares what you think you are talking about? You haven't shown much
common sense thus far.

If I have an algorithm that will take any arbitrary RSA key and
produce the private key by a mechanism such as the one you propose,
you are (almost certainly) proposing an algorithm that will factor
arbitrary numbers that are a product of two primes. I can't prove that
right now -- not even sure that I can prove it right now. However,
there are lots of people who's intuitions likely agree with mine. Most
people believe RSA is probably equivalent to factoring.

> I don't care what the original key is, simply am I above it
> or below it.

I'm afraid that given such a function, I can derive the original key
within log[base2](n) operations.

Perry






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