RSA: Hacking and Cracking

For the most recent updates please use the Plan page. It contains a record of changes to the site. Also you can view the finished report (4/May/2001).

Try out my AES applet.

My name is Ronan Killeen and I am doing an undergraduate course, Information and Communications at Trinity College, Dublin. My final year project is RSA: Hacking and Cracking. It will investigate the possibility of breaking the encryption, widely accepted as the strongest around today. The inventers of RSA, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman predicted that it could not be broken within the lifetime of the universe. But in 1994 a challenge posed by Martin Gardner was solved by a collaboration of over 600 volunteers, proving that the estimates were a shade conservative. What if the system is not as secure as we previously thought?

Please use the following links to navigate through the site.

• A short introduction to the project
• The plan for this project
• A description of the mathematics of RSA
• Possible attacks on the system
• Factorisation - breakthroughs in this field put RSA at risk
• Primality testing - important for creating secure public keys
• The wider world of encryption systems
• A list of books and other information I have used

I have now updated the notebooks. These contain examples of RSA and the attacks described in this site. They can be downloaded here in zip format. Please note that the notebook 00_functions.nb contains all the functions from the other notebooks so that one can evaluate the enitre notebook in one go. I may complete work on converting to a package structure but only if I have time.

To run these notebooks you need a copy of Mathematica. If you don't have access to Mathematica, the notebooks can still be viewed and printed from the free viewer MathReader, that can be downloaded from Wolfram Research.

Please find a link back to my personal homepage.

killeer@tcd.ie