Ron was wrong, Whit is right

Arjen K.  Lenstra; James P.  Hughes; Maxime Augier; Joppe W.  Bos; Thorsten Kleinjung; Christophe Wachter

Paper 2012/064 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2012/064 ↗

Ron was wrong, Whit is right

Arjen K. Lenstra

James P. Hughes

Maxime Augier

Joppe W. Bos

Thorsten Kleinjung

Christophe Wachter

Abstract

We performed a sanity check of public keys collected on the web. Our main goal was to test the validity of the assumption that different random choices are made each time keys are generated. We found that the vast majority of public keys work as intended. A more disconcerting finding is that two out of every one thousand RSA moduli that we collected offer no security. Our conclusion is that the validity of the assumption is questionable and that generating keys in the real world for ``multiple-secrets'' cryptosystems such as RSA is significantly riskier than for ``single-secret'' ones such as ElGamal or (EC)DSA which are based on Diffie-Hellman.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Public-key cryptography
Publication info: Preprint.
History: 2012-02-17: last updated; 2012-02-14: published
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2012/064
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2012/064,
      author = {Arjen K.  Lenstra and James P.  Hughes and Maxime Augier and Joppe W.  Bos and Thorsten Kleinjung and Christophe Wachter},
      title = {Ron was wrong, Whit is right},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2012/064},
      year = {2012},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/064}
}