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 ...

Wang Chao and his colleagues at Shanghai University have announced that they have developed a method to break RSA encryption, a cryptography whose security is based on the difficulty of prime ...

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 ...

Bitcoin’s private keys won’t be breached any time soon, but the industry still needs to transition to “post-quantum cryptography.” A report that Chinese researchers have employed a D-Wave quantum ...

For the last two days my inbox (and LinkedIn messages) has been flooded with questions about headlines claiming that “Chinese researchers broke RSA encryption with a quantum computer, threatening ...

The number 1 is not considered a prime number because it has only 1 positive divisor. Some prime numbers form “twin primes,” like 11 and 13 or 17 and 19. These pairs differ by exactly two. Large prime ...

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, ...

Researchers are closing in on deciphering 1,024-bit RSA encryption, security industry watchers said following an unprecedented numbers-cracking feat by a group of French, German, and Japanese ...