Friday, April 11th at 4:00pm in Kerchof Hall 317 (pizza arrives at 3:45)
Speaker: Kathryn Lesh (Union College)
Title: Low exponent attacks on the RSA cryptosystem

Abstract: The RSA cryptosystem is widely used today to protect the secrecy of data transmitted over the Internet, such as credit card numbers. Encryption and decryption in RSA both involve computing an exponentiation, which is computationally intensive, so there is a temptation to shorten computations by using small exponents. (Computing 17³ is so much easier than computing 17⁵⁰¹.) In this talk, we'll discuss "low exponent attacks" on RSA such as those devised in the 1990s by Weiner, Boneh and Durfee, and Coppersmith. It turns out that using small exponents is a really bad idea for security!