Researchers outline a lower-work classical attack on textbook RSA
The findings point to a possible future risk for stored traffic, not an immediate break of common website or remote-access systems.
Researchers from UC San Diego and Inria Nancy have proposed a classical-computing attack on RSA that can forge signatures without factoring keys. The paper, which has yet to undergo peer review, targets textbook (“raw”) RSA rather than typical website-certificate or remote-access configurations. Its estimates reduce the work for 1024-, 2048-, 3072- and 4096-bit keys from 2^80, 2^112, 2^128 and 2^144 operations to 2^65, 2^90, 2^105 and 2^119, respectively. Exploitation would require billions of queries to a key’s oracle; the researchers tested the approach on Thales Luna HSMs. That makes an immediate attack difficult, but the authors say data collected now could potentially help decrypt saved traffic weeks or months later as hardware advances.
Why it matters
The need for billions of queries makes immediate exploitation difficult, but the possibility of decrypting saved traffic later shifts the concern to long-term confidentiality. That is a potential delayed exposure, not evidence that common website-certificate or remote-access systems have been broken.
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