We performed a sanity check of public keys collected on the web. Our main goal was to test the validity of the assumption that different random choices are made each time keys are generated. We found that the vast majority of public keys work as intended. A more disconcerting finding is that two out of every one thousand RSA moduli that we collected offer no security. Our conclusion is that the validity of the assumption is questionable and that generating keys in the real world for multiple-secrets'' cryptosystems such as RSA is significantly riskier than for
single-secret'' ones such as ElGamal or (EC)DSA which are based on Diffie-Hellman.
Type
report
Author(s)
Hughes, James P.
Bos, Joppe Willem
Wachter, Christophe
Date Issued
2012
Publisher
IACR
Total of pages
17
Written at
OTHER
EPFL units
Available on Infoscience
February 16, 2012
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