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Encryption: 256-bit RSA Cracked by a Laptop in 50 sec?
“Crown Sterling… conducted a live demonstration and decrypted two RSA asymmetric public keys… Crown Sterling Computer Scientists decrypted two 256-bit asymmetric public keys in approximately 50 seconds from a standard laptop computer. Crown Sterling also announced the consistent decryption of 512-bit asymmetric public key in as little as five hours also using standard computing,” a press release sent by Christine Bloch of Crown Sterling last Friday on September 20th.
Sounds too good to be true? It may well be. The Crown Sterling announcement includes a link to a YouTube video demonstration of the algorithm, and the video supposedly shows that a laptop can decrypt a 256-bit RSA key that we’d thought that some day that only a quantum computer might be able to handle. Wikipedia estimates the task would take 3×1051 years for 50 current-class supercomputers.
If the claim were true, it would be truly astonishing and have wide implications for encryption, security and data safety. But there seems to be no corroboration or peer review of the decryption algorithm correctness. Needless to say, people are skeptical.
Prior claims by Crown Sterling related to their research into encryption and prime number factorization were widely criticized. The company has not fully reported the details of their current methodology because it could compromise current encryption technology.
Dan Guido, CEO of Trail of Bits, told the Register that “Crown Sterling was trying to mix mysticism and magic into science and that none of it made any sense. The kinds of things they were discussing can’t be found in the realm of reality.”
An article, “Snake Oil or Genius” in ARSTechnica by IT Editor Sean Gallagher was more objective and tried to dig more into Crown Sterling to see how probable of a company they are.
Joseph Hopkins, Senior Vice President of Crown Sterling , said that “as with any disruptive technology, we anticipated a degree of pushback from industry participants and competitors.”
4 comments on “Encryption: 256-bit RSA Cracked by a Laptop in 50 sec?”
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Your article is quoting the time it would take to crack 256 AES. 256 RSA on the other hand has been cracked numerous times in the past. You can not compare 256 AES with 256 RSA.
The wikipedia citation you have for the estimated time to crack 256 encryption is for 256 AES. 256 RSA is much easier to crack and the first demonstrated cracking was in the early 1990s. This recent demonstration is not impressive.
good post
Sounds too good to be true? It may well be. The Crown Sterling announcement includes a link to a YouTube video demonstration of the algorithm, and the video supposedly shows that a laptop can decrypt a 256-bit RSA key that we’d thought that some day that only a quantum computer might be able to handle. Wikipedia estimates the task would take 3×1051 years for 50 current-class supercomputers.