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 ...

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, ...

Digital security depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. A new proof shows why one method for breaking digital encryption won’t work. My recent story for Quanta explained a newly proved ...

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 ...

Prime numbers might just have lost their mystery – and online security could change forever. At a basic level, prime numbers are relatively simple to understand. They can only be divided by themselves ...

Internet security firm RSA Security is challenging individuals to test the strength of its algorithms in its latest crypto Factoring Challenge, with cash prizes of up to $200,000 at stake.

What if the key to your house was shared with 28,000 other homes? That’s essentially what researchers with Royal Holloway of the University of London discovered last week while scanning the Internet ...