🚀 go-pugleaf

in article <9054@duke.duke.UUCP>, srt@duke.UUCP (Stephen R. Tate) says:
> 
> The point about RSA is that if you can break the code, you can get
> the factorization of the key (this is easy to do).  Therefore, it is
> obviously equivalent in difficulty to factoring.

The security of an RSA scheme also depends on how the "secret" primes were
selected.  The company supplying RSA encryption would certainly offer a
way to select primes, since most people won't be able to do it themselves.
For example, they might say "type a password that you select totally at
random, such as your wife's first name or your favorite rock group" and
then replicate that totally random password to get two different 100-digit
odd numbers.  From there count by twos, testing each number for primality
(easy), and stop when you have your two totally secret 100-digit primes.

I'd expect any scheme to offer an easy way to select your secret primes,
and breaking that is not necessarily equivalent to factoring the public key.

-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	{hplabs, ihnp4}!sdcrdcf!randvax!jim
	jim@rand-unix.arpa