[ILUG] 16 year-old cracked RSA?

[David Wilkins]

On Sat, Jan 13, 2007 at 04:37:45PM +0000, Brendan Kehoe wrote:
> The Independent says
> 
>    Teen hacker is top young scientist
> 
>    Saturday January 13th 2007
> 
>    A TEENAGE hacker last night won the BT Young Scientist of the Year
>    Award.
> 
>    Somalian-born Abdusalam Abubakar (pictured right), a third year
>    student at CBS Synge Street, Dublin, has constructed a new way of
>    beating the RSA encryption system, used to protect military and
>    financial data worldwide.
> 
>    ...
> 
> I've not been able to find any real details, nor has it appeared on /. 
> or the like yet.  Anyone seen it anywhere?
> 

I saw the project display itself at the RDS on Friday.
Not familiar with the technical details, but seems to extend Wiener,
applicable to small decryption keys where apropriate quantity is
less than constant times quarter power of n, rather than less than
quarter power of n itself.

My general impression from reading the poster display was that he
seemed to have exceptional grasp of the subject for someone aged
around 16, and indeed was basing his own work on papers downloaded
from the arXiv etc.  Though I did not look at too many of the entries
at the RDS on my short visit, I am not surprised that this one
found favour with the judges.

But, this is not something that is going to throw RSA wide open
(though I am certainly not qualified to pontificate on this).
It seems more along the lines of an incremental improvement on
certain work that has developed out of Wiener's attack.

David Wilkins