Unassailable encryption algorithm cracked by EPFL researchers in two hours
A protocol based on “discrete logarithms”, deemed as one of the candidates for the Internet’s future security systems, was decrypted by EPFL researchers. Allegedly tamper-proof, it could only stand up to the school machines’ decryption attempts for two hours.
Only two hours! That can’t be good, especially when experts in the field thought it would take much longer. Another excerpt from the EPFL article:
Therefore, an EPFL team, together with Jens Zumbragel from TU Dresden, focused on a “family” of algorithms presented as candidates for the next generation of encryption keys, which made use of “supersingular curves. “We proved that it would only take two hours for EPFL computers to solve a problem of this kind. Whereas it was believed that it would take 40’000 times the age of the universe for all computers on the planet to do it!” explains Thorsten Kleinjung, post-doctoral fellow at LACAL.
You may read the complete article here.
