Public Key Break Paper

[David Wagner]

In article <1.5.4.32.19970513194224.00928884 at pop.pipeline.com>,
John Young  <jya at 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. ]