Tabling Results for Primes Considered Hard

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 3:29 PM 10/19/95, Dr. Frederick B. Cohen wrote:

>And how secure is the hash? It it possible to create values that will
>hash to each prime (or something else that does the job)? Is the hash
>something we can figure a way to precompute using massively parallel
>processing so that we can then provide a set of codes which will produce
>the desired results? (etc.)

There are a lot of primes. Parallel processors will not help much.

(These are deliberately understated points, natch.)

With even such "small" RSA moduli as 200 digits, made up of primes of
roughly 100 digits each, the computed hashes of these numbers would fill
the universe many times over. (There are estimated to be about 10^75
particles of all types in the entire universe, so each particle would be
"responsible" for storing the results (?) for about 10^20 or more primes.)

There may be many more flaws and points of attack in Netscape and SSl, but
precomputing hashes of the primes is not one of them.

--Tim May


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