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Title: There's a New Way to Break RSA Encryption

Link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/09/24/165222...

"Signature forgery." It's a new way to break RSA keys - and it doesn't
require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical
computing to "reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low
threshold" and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude.
There's "a gap in current RSA-type security assumptions," according to a
paper co-authored by University of California, San Diego professor Nadia
Heninger, who argues that gap "gives classical cryptanalytic evidence in
favor of moving away from RSA entirely during the current post-quantum
transition." The practical risk is limited, but still significant. Applying
the attack against the deprecated use of 1024-bit keys took a handful of
months on an academic CPU cluster, significantly less than the current
estimates for 1024-bit factoring that would require resources that only
nations or companies with massive resources could achieve. Widely used RSA
implementations are also safe. Nonetheless, the research has taken
cryptographers by surprise... "If this result holds up under peer review, it
would indeed be a conceptual break-through," Karsten Nohl, a cryptography
expert and the head of innovation at Allurity, said in an interview. "RSA is
as difficult to break as it is to factor large integers, at least so we
thought. The researcher suggests that you can practically break RSA without
cracking its key...." The key forgery attack Heninger and the other
researchers devised poses an immediate threat to 1024-bit RSA. Even for 2048-
and 4096-bit keys, the method reduces the security of RSA to unacceptable
levels. The National Security Agency, National Institute of Standards and
Technology, and European Union Agency for Network and Information Security
require that any cryptosystem should provide a level of no less than 128 or
more bits, meaning the operations required must exceed 2**128. The forgery
attack drops these levels to 2**65, 2**90, and 2**119 for 1024-, 2048-, and
4096-bit keys respectively. These levels may further drop because Heninger's
team did all the coding by hand and used no AI or GPUs in performing the
forgeries. The researcher said these tools will "almost certainly" drop the
security levels further. The attack works only against blind-signature
implementations of RSA... Still, some real-world systems continue to use
blind-signature, also known as textbook, RSA... The paper's authors and other
researchers stress that the new attack poses little real-world threat. It
does, however, drastically lower the estimated security of textbook RSA, and
it does so in a way no one knew of previously... The new attack will further
increase the urgency of completely moving away from the cryptosystem. Thanks
to long-time Slashdot reader phatrabt for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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