I'm aware of the basic functionality of private-public key encryption. Brute forcing possible private keys should eventually result in a specific public key (seeing as how there's a limited set of private keys). I think it might be possible to have public keys that no private key maps to, I'm not sure however and it would also be hard to prove experimentally seeing how the universe of private keys is quite large. Also note that this kind of brute force attack isn't going to be feasible in the near future. (however in 2100 it's likely an easy trick they teach in high school's equivalent.)
Lewis 2011/7/8 Nico Williams <[email protected]> > 2011/7/7 lodewijk andré de la porte <[email protected]>: > > I honestly don't see how. A transaction has an orgin, which is verified > to > > have the coins, and a destination, which is a public key that must have a > > private key. AFAIK every public key has a computable private key > > counterpart. > > But please correct me. > > In some (most?) public key cryptosystems it's possible to prove that a > valid public key has a corresponding private key (that is, there > exists a valid private key for which the given public key *is* the > public key). That's used for public key validation. It's not > possible, however, to prove that the private key still exists. Also, > it's NOT possible to classically compute a private key from a public > key -- when that is possible we say that the algorithm in question is > broken :) > > Nico > -- > _______________________________________________ > cryptography mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography >
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