Re: Plaintext

Randy Weems (rweems@hotmail.com)
Thu, 03 Jul 1997 06:35:23 PDT

>...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.

Nope, wouldn't have worked. RSA chose a random key, encrypted the
message, and threw the key away. It wasn't written down or
permanently stored anywhere. If you had broken into RSA's facilities,
the best you could have done was get the rest of the plaintext, not the
key. The correct key was verified by seeing if it would properly decrypt
the cyphertext to the plaintext (or encrypt the plaintext to the
cyphertext).

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Randy Weems mailto:rweems@hotmail.com
http://www.concentric.net/~Mithran/

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