Monday, March 27, 2006

A drink with Shamir(S) of RSA!


RSA has been one of the most widely used and secure Cryptosystem for interent security, e-commerce and what not! However it is quite interesting to know that prime numbers whose notion was quite abstract can be quite useful. For the unitiated, RSA stands for Rivest, Shamir(the guy on the left in the photo) and Adleman, named after the inventors of the secure system. RSA is secure(as of now) since the factorisation of large numbers is a difficult problem. The factorisation of 193 digit number RSA-640
3107418240490043721350750035888567930037346022842727545720161948823
2064405180815045563468296717232867824379162728380334154710731085019
19548529007337724822783525742386454014691736602477652346609
took 5 months on 80 2.2 GHz Opteron CPUs! It was factored by F. Bahr, M. Boehm, J. Franke and T. Kleinjung of the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security (BSI). The factors are

163473364580925384844313388386509085984178367003309
2312181110852389333100104508151212118167511579

and

190087128166482211312685157393541397547189678996851
5493666638539088027103802104498957191261465571

which are both primes. Even though we know much larger primes, its really difficult to factor large numbers and which is making your internet banking, credit cards and sensitive passwords safe! I was lucky to meet and know Adi Shamir, one of the inventors, at a conference at Le Meridian, New Delhi in Feb, 2004. The person on the right is Professor R Balasubramanian(Balu) who is the present director of IMSc and a famous Number Theorist and I was quite lucky to have studied under him and know him well!

4 comments:

Vivek said...

Good blog. But you could write about the RSA forms used now! :)

Dr Shanta Laishram said...

That I will do sometime!

Asha Khumukcham said...

"Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility. In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility."

Harder to find DARING VENTURE to attempt finding out..........................

Nikhil Joshi said...

thanks shanta...i didn't read it earlier...keep seeing the message "rsa key permenantly added to host" everytime I do ssh...matlab ab samajh mein aa raha hain...