Some news from a paper I am reading- not surprised that RSA has a problem .

http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/064.pdf

Abstract. We performed a sanity check of public keys collected on the web. Our main goal was to test the validity of the assumption that dierent random choices are made each time keys are generated.We found that the vast majority of public keys work as intended. A more disconcerting finding is that two out of every one thousand RSA moduli that we collected offer no security.

Our conclusion is that the validity of the assumption is questionable and that generating keys in the real world for multiple-secrets” cryptosystems such as RSA is signicantly riskier than for single-secret” ones such as ElGamal or (EC)DSA which are based on Die-Hellman.

Keywords: Sanity check, RSA, 99.8% security, ElGamal, DSA, ECDSA, (batch) factoring, discrete logarithm, Euclidean algorithm, seeding random number generators, K9.

and

99.8% Security. More seriously, we stumbled upon 12720 dierent 1024-bit RSA moduli that offer no security. Their secret keys are accessible to anyone who takes the trouble to redo our work. Assuming access to the public key collection, this is straightforward compared to more

traditional ways to retrieve RSA secret keys (cf. [5,15]). Information on the aected X.509 certicates and PGP keys is given in the full version of this paper, cf. below. Overall, over the data we collected 1024-bit RSA provides 99.8% security at best (but see Appendix A).

However no algol is perfect and even Elliptic Based Crypto ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography#Fast_reduction_.28NIST_curves.29 )has a flaw called Shor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm

Funny thing is ECC is now used for Open DNS

http://dnscurve.org/crypto.html

The DNSCurve project adds link-level public-key protection to DNS packets. This page discusses the cryptographic tools used in DNSCurve.

ELLIPTIC-CURVE CRYPTOGRAPHY

DNSCurve uses elliptic-curve cryptography, not RSA.

RSA is somewhat older than elliptic-curve cryptography: RSA was introduced in 1977, while elliptic-curve cryptography was introduced in 1985. However, RSA has shown many more weaknesses than elliptic-curve cryptography. RSA’s effective security level was dramatically reduced by the linear sieve in the late 1970s, by the quadratic sieve and ECM in the 1980s, and by the number-field sieve in the 1990s. For comparison, a few attacks have been developed against some rare elliptic curves having special algebraic structures, and the amount of computer power available to attackers has predictably increased, but typical elliptic curves require just as much computer power to break today as they required twenty years ago.

IEEE P1363 standardized elliptic-curve cryptography in the late 1990s, including a stringent list of security criteria for elliptic curves. NIST used the IEEE P1363 criteria to select fifteen specific elliptic curves at five different security levels. In 2005, NSA issued a new “Suite B” standard, recommending the NIST elliptic curves (at two specific security levels) for all public-key cryptography and withdrawing previous recommendations of RSA.

Some specific types of elliptic-curve cryptography are patented, but DNSCurve does not use any of those types of elliptic-curve cryptography.

No wonder college kids are hacking defense databases easily nowadays!!