At 1:41 -0600 2006/04/02, Travis H. wrote:
So I'm reading up on unconditionally secure authentication in Simmon's
"Contemporary Cryptology", and he points out that with RSA, given d,
you could calculate e (remember, this is authentication not
encryption) if you could factor n, which relates the two. However,
the implication is in the less useful direction; namely, that
factoring n is at least as hard as breaking RSA. As of the books
publication in 1992, it was not known whether the decryption of almost
all ciphers for arbitrary exponents e is as hard as factoring.
This is news to me! What's the current state of knowledge?
It's conceivable that there might be a way to decrypt RSA messages
without knowing d. If you don't know d, you still can't factor n.
Whereas if you can factor n, you can find d, and decrypt messages. So
the problems are not equivalent, and the RSA problem might be easier
than the integer factorization problem. (At least, the above is my
understanding.)
Greg.
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