# Tag Info

11

The security of every single cryptographic algorithm(*) of any kind is ultimately based on: "many people looked at it for a long time and did not find a way to break it". Security proofs boasted by some algorithms are quite useful but they don't actually prove security, they move it (a security proof is a reduction to another problem which has to be assumed ...

10

Ricky's link answers your main question in the comments (that knowing the private key is equivalent to knowing the factorization of $N$). But your "attack" is unfortunately part of a class of properties which might appear insightful at first, but which eventually boil down to something like this: "find integers $(m,k)$ such that $m+kn$ is a perfect square" ...

10

If we consider an RSA modulus $N$ of $n$ bits ($n=2048$ in the question) product of $k$ primes of about $n/k$ bits, how high can be $k$ without loosing security? That's a problem studied even before Multiprime-RSA was named, with no definitive answer other than: we can't err on the unsafe side with $k=2$. Why would we want $k>2$? For classical ...

9

Actually, that's an expected result since $65 \equiv 10 \pmod{55}$. You should choose $m < n$ to avoid this problem.

9

Actually, that was proposed here back in 1998 (sorry, an electronic version of the paper does not appear to be on the web) -- the author claimed a modest speedup in the private operations. However, that speed up would appear to be about the same if you just did "multiprime RSA", that is, selected an RSA modulus of the form $pqr$ for three distinct primes ...

9

No, there is no specific vulnerability associated to choosing $p$ and $q$ with size differing by $i$ bits (or $2\cdot i$ bits as in the statement) for small $i$. However, if $i$ gets too big: That improves the odds that ECM will manage to factor $n$ for some fixed size of $n$, and at some point ECM will become the best algorithm; this is the case if $i$ is ...

9

The question asks how to systematically pick the public exponent $e$ in RSA. I'll stick to public modulus $N$ that is the product of exactly two distinct odd primes $p$ and $q$, but the choice of $e$ is not fundamentally different in multiprime RSA. What's an acceptable public exponent $e$? The public exponent in RSA should be an integer $e>1$ with ...

8

I don't think idea 1 can be made to work at all. The main point is that in order to generate a correct secret decryption key, the key generator must know the order of $\mathbb Z^*_n$, i.e., the totient of the modulus $n$. The generator knows that $n=p \cdot q$, where it believes that $p$ and $q$ are primes, and so it believes that the totient is ...

8

Rather than making an overly long question even longer, I post this as an answer. As part of the update process of the French security recommendations linked in the question, I suggested (June 2013) a waiver for the requirement/recommendation that $e>2^{16}$ when using a padding scheme with a security proof. It was kindly refused (within 6 weeks), with ...

8

Yes. Modern cryptosystems are designed and analysed under the assumption that the key is never used for anything else. If you use your encryption keys for digital signatures, you are violating that assumption, and it is very easy to construct schemes where this violation will compromise security. It is possible to construct schemes that can use the same ...

8

We want a non-trivial factorization of a moderate odd integer $n$ into positive integers $p$ and $q$, knowing that such factorization with $|p-q|$ suitably small exists. Perhaps the most elementary method answering the question is trial division by integers starting at $\lfloor\sqrt n\rfloor$, going down. This succeeds after checking divisibility of $n$ by ...

8

I know an algorithm that runs in polynomial time would be able to break an RSA key pair "quickly". But how quickly is "quickly"? No way to say, it might be microseconds, and it might be large multiplies of the age of the universe. When we say that an algorithm runs in polynomial time, we're not saying anything about how fast the algorithm runs given ...

7

Selecting a small $d$ is known to be insecure. Wiener has shown in 1990 that if $\log d \leq \frac14 \log N$, the private exponent $d$ can be reconstructed from the public key $(N,e)$. If you're interested in making the private computational cost cheaper, then I would suggest that RSA is not the best solution; I would recommend you start looking at ...

7

Short answer No, RSA encryption with a private key is not the same as RSA signature generation. RSA encryption can only be performed with an RSA public key according to the RSA standard. The terms Raw RSA or textbook RSA are often used to indicate RSA without a padding scheme. Raw RSA simply consists of modular exponentiation. Raw RSA is vulnerable to many ...

7

Yes, they are (deterministically) equivalent. The original RSA paper (Section IX.C), working off Miller's results (Theorem 3), showed how knowing the secret exponent $d$ was probabilistically equivalent to factoring $n$. Later, using more advanced techniques, Coron and May showed how to deterministically reduce finding $d$ to factoring $n$.

7

There's no real difference between $p$ and $q$ in RSA. It looks like OpenSSL just has the agreement "$p$ has to be bigger than $q$" for conveniences. One of the numbers has to be bigger than the other (otherwise they would be the same number, and $p = q$ is very bad in RSA). Just use two examples: $p = 13$ and $q = 11$. $p$ is bigger than $q$, all right. ...

7

If $p$ and $q$ are 1024-bit primes, then by definition of the bit size of an integer (at least, a prime in a cryptographic context with glimpses of RSA), $2^{1023}\le p<2^{1024}$ and $2^{1023}\le q<2^{1024}$. Thus their product $n=pq$ verifies $2^{2046}\le n<2^{2048}$, and $n$ is a 2047-bit or 2048-bit integer. We show by exhibition that both cases ...

7

Copy / paste that key into http://phpseclib.sourceforge.net/x509/asn1parse.php and you'll see that there are several different integers in there. p is there, q is there as is the exponent and several other integers to speed things up by taking advantage of the Chinese Remainder Theorem. The key is encoded using DER and derives semantic meaning via ASN.1. ...

6

This expands CodesInChaos's comment into an answer. Forward Secrecy (that is, maintaining confidentiality of messages enciphered before compromise of the long term key) can be achieved in a protocol using a public-key signature scheme with a long-term public key, and a public-key encryption scheme with a per-session key; but in the case of RSA signature and ...

6

Apart from you're choosing a message greater than the modulus, another thing that might be confusing you is that, in this case, $C \equiv P \bmod N$. That is, you take your message, 65, which is equivalent to 10 modulo 55, and encrypt it, and the result is 10, because $10^{13} \bmod 55 = 10$, So, when you decrypt it, you take the ciphertext 10, and ...

6

A possible RSA variant uses: some odd exponent $e>2$ (that can be $e=3$ or $e=2^{16}+1$ as customary in standard RSA); $p$ and $q$ distinct large random primes, with $\gcd(e,p)=\gcd(e,p-1)=\gcd(e,q-1)=1$; $N=p^2\cdot q$; some $d$ computed such that $d\cdot e\equiv 1\pmod{\operatorname{lcm}(p,p-1,q-1)}$; public-key function $x\to x^e\bmod N$; private-key ...

6

The difference is inconsequential in this context. If you do some "processing" (e.g. generating a RSA key pair) using a deterministic and publicly known algorithm (e.g. OpenSSL's code) where the only parameter which is not known to the attacker is a random $n$-bit seed (e.g. $n$ = 256 for 32 bytes from /dev/urandom), then there is a theoretical possibility ...

6

There are three distinct computational problems related to RSA. They are: FACTORIZATION: given an RSA modulus $n$, find its prime factors $p$ and $q$; ORDER: given an RSA modulus $n$, find the order $\lambda$ of the multiplicative group modulo $n$; RSA Problem: given a ring element $a \in \mathbb{Z}_n$, a public exponent $e$ and an RSA modulus, find an ...

6

There is consensus that it is safe to use random primes $p$ and $q$ when generating 2048-bit (or wider) RSA public moduli which two prime factors $p$ and $q$ are about half the key size. That is sanctioned by FIPS 186-4, appendix B.3; specifically, wording in B.3.1 item A: Using methods 1 and 2 [yielding provable (1) and probable (2) random primes], ...

6

ECDSA should in general create signatures faster than RSA for the same cryptographic strength if you just look at the mathematics. In the end the modular exponentiation is performed for smaller numbers. However, ECDSA depends on a random number generator, so ECDSA speeds may be slower if the random number generator blocks for any reason (and not using a good ...

6

BouncyCastle has a really bad ECC implementation. It uses affine coordinates which incur a huge performance hit (factor 20 or so) since it computes a field inversion after every single step. Good implementations use Jacobi coordinates (or a similar approach) where denominators are kept and there is only one field inversion at the end. It's also potentially ...

6

Think about this: what does it mean that $\gcd(e_B, e_C)=1$. Formally that means there exist some $s_1, s_2$ such that $e_Bs_1 + e_Cs_2=1$. Say you have two ciphertexts (the following math is all done modulo the shared modulus), $C_B=M^{e_B}$ and $C_C=M^{e_C}$. You can do the following: \begin{align} ...

6

No, the RSA key size is not the size of the private key exponent. It is customarily the number of bits in the public modulus (which is known as $N$). In other words, the key size is the integer $k$ such that $2^{k-1}\le N<2^k$. In most implementations (and all implementations conforming to PKCS#1), a private exponent $d$ has size in bits at most the key ...

6

The only reason you are seeing this is because you are dealing with such small primes. With primes like we would use in practice (1024 bits), the probability of this happening is very, very small. And, it can only happen when $e>\sqrt{\lambda(n)}$. Since we typically use $e=65537$ in practice, it is guaranteed to not happen. Anyways, there is no mistake ...

6

To make it easier for humans to read.

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