Bitcoin Forum

Other => Off-topic => Topic started by: caveden on February 17, 2012, 11:05:37 AM



Title: RSA: 2 out of 1000 public keys are not secure
Post by: caveden on February 17, 2012, 11:05:37 AM
Have you seen this?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/02/14/2322213/998-security-for-real-world-public-keys

Thankfully to us Satoshi did not choose RSA for the private/public key algorithm of bitcoin!

This is important nevertheless. Ok, 2 per thousand is statistically very low, but the fact that all these vulnerable keys can be gathered by any skilled enough attacker is quite troubling.


I wonder how fast would the bitcoin development team be able to work out an algorithm migration if a similarly dangerous vulnerability were to be found on ECDSA or SHA-256 (these are the algorithms used for public/private key and hashing in bitcoin, respectively, right?)


Title: Re: RSA: 2 out of 1000 public keys are not secure
Post by: kjlimo on February 17, 2012, 12:46:47 PM
I hope someone understands the implications of this, b/c I don't.

... and I'm relying on others to be sure it doesn't affect me.  I don't like being vulnerable, but I also know my strengths...