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From: ghsu@unstable.nswc.navy.mil (Guan-Hsong Hsu)
Subject: Re: need secure OS to entrust millions to
In-Reply-To: gutschk@uni-muenster.de's message of 03 Mar 1996 10:26:17 GMT
To: gutschk@uni-muenster.de (Markus Gutschke)
Message-ID: <GHSU.96Mar7051927@unstable.nswc.navy.mil>
Sender: news@relay.nswc.navy.mil
Reply-To: ghsu@relay.nswc.navy.mil
Organization: Naval Surface Warfare Center
References: <4gi6t6$3h9@lace.colorado.edu> <nc0453Dn96w6.93F@netcom.com>
<y5ad974s4v4.fsf@graphics.cs.nyu.edu> <4gqf17$1lr@cynic.portal.ca>
<1996Feb25.152559.8977@jarvis.cs.toronto.edu>
<4gvchb$ln5@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <4h7rdd$qeu@park.uvsc.edu>
<GUTSCHK.96Mar3112617corpus@uni-muenster.de>
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 10:19:27 GMT
Lines: 41
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All these discussion of security is very interesting. I am not
familiar with either security or encryptions so it is very interesting
to follow all these. There is, hoever, an error that need to be
corrected at least to clarify it for myself :
In article <GUTSCHK.96Mar3112617corpus@uni-muenster.de> gutschk@uni-muenster.de (Markus Gutschke) writes:
> ................................................... header deleted
>
> The questions whether public key encryption is secure, is not related
> to it being public. The security of RSA is based on the assumption
> that there is no good algorithm for factorizing large prime
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> numbers. .........
^^^^^^^^^
Markus, there must be a mistake here. By definition, prime numbers
are numbers that can only be devided by itself. So there is no
algorithm to factorize prime numbers, period. I might not know
anything about encryption, but I definitely got my math right.
Perhaps you meant "no good algorithm to determine if a large number is
prime" or "no good algorithm to factorize an arbitrary large number by
primes"? In either case, there are some standard algorithms that
seems to work fine. So perhaps you meant something else, didn't you?
Could someone suggest a good source where I might start reading
about the theory or the algorithm for RSA and/or encrytion in general.
OK, if I ask people to suggest references, I should tell people what
kind of background I have. I have a PhD in mathematics and I am a
researcher for US Navy on subjects unrelated to security issues. I
know UNIX and TCP/IP network security issues pretty well (at least for
those affects my HP cluster) but know practically nothing about
encryption. But I can be taught!
--
Guan-Hsong Hsu email: ghsu@relay.nswc.navy.mil, ghsu@capaccess.org
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Intuition (n): an uncanny sixth sense which tells people that they are
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