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Factoring as a Service

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9603))

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Abstract

The difficulty of integer factorization is fundamental to modern cryptographic security using RSA encryption and signatures. Although a 512-bit RSA modulus was first factored in 1999, 512-bit RSA remains surprisingly common in practice across many cryptographic protocols. Popular understanding of the difficulty of 512-bit factorization does not seem to have kept pace with developments in computing power. In this paper, we optimize the CADO-NFS and Msieve implementations of the number field sieve for use on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud platform, allowing a non-expert to factor 512-bit RSA public keys in under four hours for $75. We go on to survey the RSA key sizes used in popular protocols, finding hundreds or thousands of deployed 512-bit RSA keys in DNSSEC, HTTPS, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, DKIM, SSH, and PGP.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Daniel Bernstein, Tanja Lange, Pierrick Gaudry, Emmanuel Thomé, and Paul Zimmermann for helpful comments and discussion. Nicole Limtiaco, Toma Pigli, Zachary Ives, and Sudarshan Muralidhar contributed to early versions of this project. We thank Osman Surkatty for help with Amazon services. We are grateful to Zakir Durumeric, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, and Ryan Castellucci for providing data. We thank Ian Goldberg for suggesting additional references [21] and Lionel Debroux for a correction. This work is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. CNS-1408734, a gift from Cisco, and an AWS Research Education grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

    Luke Valenta, Shaanan Cohney, Alex Liao, Joshua Fried, Satya Bodduluri & Nadia Heninger

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  1. Luke Valenta
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  2. Shaanan Cohney
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  3. Alex Liao
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  4. Joshua Fried
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  6. Nadia Heninger
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Correspondence to Nadia Heninger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University Munich, Garching, Germany

    Jens Grossklags

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering-ESAT, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Bart Preneel

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© 2017 International Financial Cryptography Association

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Valenta, L., Cohney, S., Liao, A., Fried, J., Bodduluri, S., Heninger, N. (2017). Factoring as a Service. In: Grossklags, J., Preneel, B. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9603. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54970-4_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54970-4_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-54969-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-54970-4

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