Re: Plaintext

Andy Church (achurch@dragonfire.net)
Wed, 02 Jul 1997 22:26:43 EDT

> The gun isn't even necessary. Just call them up and say you're from net ops
> or something. All this talk about attacking cryptographic algorithms is kind
> of silly, since the weak link by far is people. It would have been much
> faster to brute force open the desk at RSA where someone wrote the key down.

Except that there was no such desk. Assuming RSA was telling the
truth, the keys were generated randomly by computer and never stored
anywhere. They had the _plaintext_ so they could check whether a solution
was right, but that alone wouldn't have gotten you the prize.

--Andy Church | If Bell Atlantic really is the heart
achurch@dragonfire.net | of communication, then it desperately
www.dragonfire.net/~achurch/ | needs a quadruple bypass.