What's interesting is that I just watched a video that strongly relates to this problem last night (from DJB at CCC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuSnY_O8D

What's interesting is that I just watched a video that strongly relates to this problem last night (from DJB at CCC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuSnY_O8DqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuSnY_O8DqQ http://facthacks.cr.yp.to/ http://facthacks.cr.yp.to/ It is only part of the video, but they talk about searching Google and finding partial private keys, e.g. ---- BEGIN PRIVATE KEY ---. Even with text missing, it is trivial to recover the entire key, because of redundancy that Akamai neglected to take into account. I never really thought about how those ASCII strings are encoded, but it's actually the 6 or so values encoded. If some are missing, you can recover the others. In retrospect, why shouldn't the private keyh have RFC 822-like key value format so this is obvious? I don't see why it has to be encoded at all; the format is unnecessarily obscure. The rest of this talk is also great. Most of it is accessible to non-cryptographers (like me), as long as you understand basic arithmetic and have an undergrad-level overview of public key crypto (which they give). They provide very readable and runnable Sage scripts. I really like the batch GCD attacks. Very elegant and effective.