Attacks on the RSA Cryptosystem

 


Here is a description of my term paper, for the Foundations of Cryptography course (floated as Special Topics in Theoretical Computer Science).

My Term Paper

Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. Elementary Attacks

  3. Factoring Algorithms

  4. TWINKLE: Breaking 512-bit RSA

Time taken by Number Field Sieve

The graph below shows how the time taken by the number field sieve to factorize a number increases with the number of bits of the number. It is assumed that factorization of a 450 bit number (the record before TWINKLE) takes one unit of time.

Presentation

Here are the PowerPoint 95 slides of my presentation to the class. As part of our colloquium course, I gave a talk on TWINKLE, Shamir's optical computing device used to crack 512-bit RSA. Here is Shamir's paper.

References:

  1. 20 Years of Attack on the RSA Cryptosystem
    Dan Boneh, Notices of the AMS (Feb. 1999)
  2. A Tale of Two Sieves
    Carl Pomerance, Notices of the AMS (Dec. 1996)
  3. Factoring Large Numbers with the TWINKLE Device
    Adi Shamir
  4. An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers
    G.H. Hardy & E.M. Wright

 Vaibhav Vaish
(csu96173@cse.iitd.ernet.in)