Math's holy grail could bring disaster for internet

J Dunlap

:omg: Clickety What do the resident math and encryption gurus think of this one? Is it everything they make it out to be? Will it really bring e-commerce to its knees if they discover the answer?

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

peterchen

If it's true, "Security through Obscurity" might become en vogue again...

we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is Vonnegut jr.
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J Dunlap

That's just what I was thinking - but it seems to me that we'd see no end to the problems and security breaches should it come to that. It's hard for a large company to keep its data communications obscure for very long without encryption. :sigh:

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dave Wengier

jdunlap wrote: Will it really bring e-commerce to its knees if they discover the answer? From my (limited) understanding, it would make prime numbers easy to calculate. Most encryption at the moment seems to rely on the fact that at the moment, it takes many many many many (many) years to calculate the correct prime numbers, thereby making the attempt futile. (Arguably encryption based on futility was a bad idea to begin with, but I couldn't have come up with anything better so i'll shutup :)) Hopefully quantum encryption[^] will be a reality before long too, so perhaps the discoveries will coincide and we will all be safe. --- Dave

Nnamdi Onyeyiri

:omg::wtf::omg::wtf::omg::wtf: i can imagine that proof "disappearing" into the hands of a government :suss:

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J Dunlap

That's what I figured, but I wanted to find out if I'd missed something.

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Jerry Hammond

Wow, all this encryption stuff is "nifty" reading! Seriously, thanks for the links all. Interesting brain food for the nightly read. Best, Jerry

Contrary to the cliche, genuinely nice guys most often finish first or very near it.--Malcolm Forbes

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Corinna John

Forget all that old public key encryption. :zzz: The future belongs to quantum key exchange[^] in combination with symmetric one time pad encryption. :-D That's 100% safe, as long as it's used carefully. For private persons QKE will still be complicated and expensive for a few years, so obscurity[^] is the way to go for home users.

Giannakakis Kostas

The author exaggerates a bit. Two years ago PRIMES (the decisional problem of determining whether or not a given integer n is prime) was proved to be in P. See The PRIMES is in P little FAQ . This is an interesting result but has nothing to do with cryptography. The same applies here. To prove Riemann hypothesis will certainly win you $1M and a place in Hall of Fame for mathematicians, but hundreds of pages with cryptic math won't do the breaking of codes any easier. After all Riemann hypothesis is generally considered to be true, nothing new here, is just the proof that was missing. A method for efficiently factorizing large integers could bring disaster though. But does the proof proposes or suggests a method of this importance? Biggest advancements in science come from proposing new problems, not by solving old ones.

Stuart van Weele

AFAIK only RSA type encryption schemes would be in trouble. AES and other schemes that "confuse and diffuse" through a series of stages would still be safe. Also, there is a replacement for RSA on the way that does not involve primes.

J Dunlap

Now this is the sort of reply I hoped to get. I suspected that there might be some existing encyrption schemes that didn't use primes, and therefore would not be affected. Thanks for the info.

"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower