Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...

The bolding is mine, because if in fact the agency did crack the encryption schemes used for bank transactions (the Times is somewhat unclear on that point), then in doing so it may have solved a math ...

RSA encryption is a major foundation of digital security and is one of the most commonly used forms of encryption, and yet it operates on a brilliantly simple premise: it's easy to multiply two large ...

Researchers are closing in on deciphering 1,024-bit RSA encryption, security industry watchers said following an unprecedented numbers-cracking feat by a group of French, German, and Japanese ...

A large chunk of the global economy now rests on public key cryptography. We generally agree that with long enough keys, it is infeasible to crack things encoded that way. Until such time as it isn’t, ...

When sending your credit card number through a public medium, such as the Internet, your financial credibility may be compromised if the number is not first encrypted. It is impossible to tell who may ...

Nearly three decades ago, a new method for encrypting digital information transformed online security. Dubbed RSA↓ RSA stands for “Rivest–Shamir–Adleman,” the surnames of its inventors. , it exploited ...

In contrast to the cooperative preparations required for setting up private key encryption, such as secret-sharing and close coordination between sender and receiver ...