The bolding is mine, because if in fact the agency did crack the encryption schemes used for bank transactions (the Times is somewhat unclear on that point), then in doing so it may have solved a math ...

The number 1 is not considered a prime number because it has only 1 positive divisor. Some prime numbers form “twin primes,” like 11 and 13 or 17 and 19. These pairs differ by exactly two. Large prime ...

RSA encryption is a major foundation of digital security and is one of the most commonly used forms of encryption, and yet it operates on a brilliantly simple premise: it's easy to multiply two large ...

The commonly used RSA encryption algorithm can now be cracked by a quantum computer with only 100,000 qubits, but the technical challenges to building such a machine remain numerous ...

A large chunk of the global economy now rests on public key cryptography. We generally agree that with long enough keys, it is infeasible to crack things encoded that way. Until such time as it isn’t, ...

As computers and math techniques become more powerful and sophisticated, current encryption standards could be made obsolete in as little as five years The strength of the encryption used now to ...

Digital security depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. A new proof shows why one method for breaking digital encryption won’t work. My recent story for Quanta explained a newly proved ...

Nearly three decades ago, a new method for encrypting digital information transformed online security. Dubbed RSA↓ RSA stands for “Rivest–Shamir–Adleman,” the surnames of its inventors. , it exploited ...

What if the key to your house was shared with 28,000 other homes? That’s essentially what researchers with Royal Holloway of the University of London discovered last week while scanning the Internet ...

San Jose, Calif. – Altera Corp. has developed what it calls a way to lower the cost of RSA decryption. By porting a reusable RSA intellectual-property core to its Cyclone series of FPGAs, Altera said ...