5 ms·

They posted a video of their attempt on YouTube demonstrating their claim - which was quickly taken down again. Thankfully it’s been mirrored; one source: https

They posted a video of their attempt on YouTube demonstrating their claim - which was quickly taken down again. Thankfully it’s been mirrored; one source: https://youtu.be/ML41g0hb7hM https://youtu.be/ML41g0hb7hM Some highlights: - they claim that the RSA equation underlies all electronic banking and public key crypto (when of course, DH, ECC and many other systems make no use of RSA) - they apparently surveyed 500 CISOs and claimed only 5% understood the math of RSA (well, yeah, you asked CISOs and not professional cryptographers - duh?) - as expected it was a really amateurish demo with pre-selected keys, not even remotely convincing. I’m actually surprised they even bothered to factor for real, rather than just faking the factorization of a 2048-bit RSA key or something - they claim it was 50 seconds on a laptop in their press release, but they’re clearly SSHed into a Linux box with 32 cores (and it was 50 seconds per key, not for both) - one line of debug output from their script matches CADO-NFS exactly, which is probably just what they’re using under the hood - they won’t accept stranger’s keys because they’re worried that info could be used maliciously... It’s so utterly absurd that this is even a thing. They have absolutely got to be running a scam, I don’t see how they could be serious about this (especially the bit about redressing CADO-NFS as their own factoring algorithm!!). If it’s a scam, I definitely hope they get sued by their investors or something... P.S. I thoroughly beat their little record with my actual 8-core laptop running YAFU - I did two keys in 28 seconds to their 2 keys in 1:40.

tialaramex 7y ago
5% sounds about plausible, anybody inquisitive and capable of say, a numerate degree subject - physics, engineering, anything over in that corner, can follow along in textbook RSA. But the CISO doesn't actually need it for their job. These sort of people are often closer to delusional than straight scammers, so that's why there's a demo of a thing that doesn't really work - they sincerely think they're onto something, even as they fail to achieve anything significant.
- nneonneo 7y ago
  I was thinking delusional, but the thing is that their thing does work - it’s just not their work. They repackaged CADO-NFS (a well-respected factoring program) and pretended that they’d invented a new factoring algorithm. It’s actually simple plagiarism. Now, what I could believe is that there’s a massively deluded guy at the top, and a bunch of underlings who are desperately trying to enact his crazy vision. But it’s pretty hard to ignore the evidence that this is a scam.

tialaramex 7y ago

5% sounds about plausible, anybody inquisitive and capable of say, a numerate degree subject - physics, engineering, anything over in that corner, can follow along in textbook RSA. But the CISO doesn't actually need it for their job. These sort of people are often closer to delusional than straight scammers, so that's why there's a demo of a thing that doesn't really work - they sincerely think they're onto something, even as they fail to achieve anything significant.

nneonneo 7y ago
I was thinking delusional, but the thing is that their thing does work - it’s just not their work. They repackaged CADO-NFS (a well-respected factoring program) and pretended that they’d invented a new factoring algorithm. It’s actually simple plagiarism. Now, what I could believe is that there’s a massively deluded guy at the top, and a bunch of underlings who are desperately trying to enact his crazy vision. But it’s pretty hard to ignore the evidence that this is a scam.