[2745] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Secure Office
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)
Sun May 24 13:43:54 1998
To: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com>
Cc: "Jay D. Dyson" <jdyson@techreports.jpl.nasa.gov>,
Cryptography List <cryptography@c2.net>
From: Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU>
Date: 22 May 1998 15:43:50 -0400
In-Reply-To: Bill Frantz's message of Wed, 20 May 1998 10:36:18 -0800
Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com> writes:
> Nonexhaustively: Factoring attacks on RSA. Knowing the public key also
> gives access to unlimited plaintext/cyphertext pairs for known plaintext
> attacks.
I've never heard of a known plaintext attack against a _public_ key.
If you can cite one I'd really like to know.
As for factoring attacks, well, you might as well brute-force the IDEA
keys in use too -- it's about as difficult! I don't see this as a
valid excuse for not publishing your public key. The only excuse I
_can_ see is the same reason to have an unpublished phone number --
you don't want random unknowns to send you random encrypted messages.
Yeah traffic analysis.
-derek
--
Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/ PP-ASEL N1NWH
warlord@MIT.EDU PGP key available
