Assignment 10

The difficult part of this reading assignment, section 6.2, was very difficult to pin down, because I had trouble understanding all of the attacks on the RSA system. The first two attacks, while I did not understand the mathematics behind them completely, made sense that if a significant portion of either p or d is known the cryptosystem could be broken more easily. This can best be understood as a significant reduction of the problem space for a brute force attack. Since RSA's security is reliant upon the infeasability of such an attack, these make sense. The low-exponent and short plaintext attacks also incur reductions in the problem space and so make some sense as well, but the timing attack was thoroughly confusing.

Despite being the cause of the most confusion for me during the reading, the timing attack on the RSA algorithm is possibly the most significant attack presented because it shows that cryptanalysis must use everything available at its disposal to find a way to decrypt messages. Future solutions to cryptosystems, for instance, may rely upon flaws in technology or human implementation of mathematically secure encryption methods. It also begs the question as to whether or not a one-time pad is actually secure despite its theoretical unbreakability.