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 ...

Hackers try to find novel ways to circumvent or under­mine data encryption schemes all the time. But at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Purdue University researcher Sze ...

RSA certificates still vulnerable to 2019 flaw, reaearchers say. Update, March 20, 2025: This story, originally published March 17, has been updated with a statement from RSA regarding the encryption ...

Chinese researchers have successfully used D-Wave‘s quantum annealing systems to break classic encryption RSA, potentially accelerating the timeline for when quantum computers could pose a real threat ...

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, ...

Encryption algorithms can be intimidating to approach, what’s with all the math involved. However, once you start digging into them, you can break the math apart into smaller steps, and get a feel of ...

A recent, yet to be proven paper claiming to have found a way to "destroy the RSA cryptosystem" has cryptographers asking what might replace it. What if a big crack appeared overnight in the ...