1. Claus-Peter Schnorr, a well-established and reputable cryptographer, publishes a paper and claims he found a new algorithm for integer factorization, which is faster than the best known algorithm today (Number Field Sieve).
2. If it's all the paper says, it probably won't attract that much attention, at best it leads to a new wave of RSA keysize upgrade (or transition to ECC). But today, this paper appeared on the Cryptology ePrint Archive, and its abstract reads "This destroys the RSA cryptosystem", the use of strong language is extraordinary, a reader may interpret it as "the speedup is significant and all RSA keys can be broken." Researchers usually don't make such claims.
3. Meanwhile, it's also very suspicious for two reasons. First, this claim didn't appear in the actual paper, only the ePrint Archive web page, and it also includes an embarrassing typo. Also, the submitted paper wasn't even the latest version, which is available at Schnorr's web page, but an old version from 2019. Many people suspected that the paper was submitted by someone else, who happened to see an earlier version on the web and got too excited about it, and added the "destroys RSA" claim.
4. But now, personal communication with Schnorr confirmed the paper was indeed submitted by him, and he indeed makes the "destroys RSA" claim. Schnorr also said he uploaded the wrong file.
5. About 10 minutes ago, an updated preprint was published, that includes the sentence, "This destroys the RSA cryptosystem".
bcaa7f3a8bbc|5 years ago
2. If it's all the paper says, it probably won't attract that much attention, at best it leads to a new wave of RSA keysize upgrade (or transition to ECC). But today, this paper appeared on the Cryptology ePrint Archive, and its abstract reads "This destroys the RSA cryptosystem", the use of strong language is extraordinary, a reader may interpret it as "the speedup is significant and all RSA keys can be broken." Researchers usually don't make such claims.
3. Meanwhile, it's also very suspicious for two reasons. First, this claim didn't appear in the actual paper, only the ePrint Archive web page, and it also includes an embarrassing typo. Also, the submitted paper wasn't even the latest version, which is available at Schnorr's web page, but an old version from 2019. Many people suspected that the paper was submitted by someone else, who happened to see an earlier version on the web and got too excited about it, and added the "destroys RSA" claim.
4. But now, personal communication with Schnorr confirmed the paper was indeed submitted by him, and he indeed makes the "destroys RSA" claim. Schnorr also said he uploaded the wrong file.
5. About 10 minutes ago, an updated preprint was published, that includes the sentence, "This destroys the RSA cryptosystem".