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June 11, 2008
Negative externalities of key cracking
Aside from being kind of pointless, Terence Spies pointed out to me today that there's a real negative externality to an attempt to crack Gpcode's RSA key. Once you've bothered to build a big distributed RSA key cracking system (this assumes of course that this is practical, which isn't clear), there's a temptation to use it, and there are lots of 1024-bit and smaller RSA keys floating around in the world. It's not at all clear that the benefit from cracking the public key used for a single piece of ransomware exceeds the cost of a crack of long-term keys used for legitimate purposes.Posted by ekr at June 11, 2008 6:21 PM | Filed under: COMSEC