[ISN] Flaw Found in an Online Encryption Method

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/technology/researchers-find-flaw-in-an-online-encryption-method.html

By JOHN MARKOFF
The New York Times
February 14, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO -- A team of European and American mathematicians and 
cryptographers have discovered an unexpected weakness in the encryption 
system widely used worldwide for online shopping, banking, e-mail and 
other Internet services intended to remain private and secure.

The flaw -- which involves a small but measurable number of cases — has 
to do with the way the system generates random numbers, which are used 
to make it practically impossible for an attacker to unscramble digital 
messages. While it can affect the transactions of individual Internet 
users, there is nothing an individual can do about it. The operators of 
large Web sites will need to make changes to ensure the security of 
their systems, the researchers said.

The potential danger of the flaw is that even though the number of users 
affected by the flaw may be small, confidence in the security of Web 
transactions is reduced, the authors said.

The system requires that a user first create and publish the product of 
two large prime numbers, in addition to another number, to generate a 
public “key.” The original numbers are kept secret. To encrypt a 
message, a second person employs a formula that contains the public 
number. In practice, only someone with knowledge of the original prime 
numbers can decode that message.

[...]


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