Wang Chao and his colleagues at Shanghai University have announced that they have developed a method to break RSA encryption, a cryptography whose security is based on the difficulty of prime ...

Digital security depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. A new proof shows why one method for breaking digital encryption won’t work. My recent story for Quanta explained a newly proved ...

Bitcoin’s private keys won’t be breached any time soon, but the industry still needs to transition to “post-quantum cryptography.” A report that Chinese researchers have employed a D-Wave quantum ...

Nearly three decades ago, a new method for encrypting digital information transformed online security. Dubbed RSA↓ RSA stands for “Rivest–Shamir–Adleman,” the surnames of its inventors. , it exploited ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American A team of researchers has successfully ...

A large chunk of the global economy now rests on public key cryptography. We generally agree that with long enough keys, it is infeasible to crack things encoded that way. Until such time as it isn’t, ...

Researchers are closing in on deciphering 1,024-bit RSA encryption, security industry watchers said following an unprecedented numbers-cracking feat by a group of French, German, and Japanese ...

Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...