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Researchers from UC San Diego and Inria Nancy have published a paper describing a new attack that significantly reduces the number of operations needed to factor RSA keys used in the 'textbook' or 'raw' RSA variant. For 1024-bit keys, the required calculations drop from roughly 2^80 to 2^65, with similar reductions across 2048-, 3072-, and 4096-bit key lengths. The findings have not yet completed peer review.
A team including UC San Diego professor Nadia Heninger published research describing a new classical-computing attack that forges RSA signatures without factoring the underlying keys. The method reportedly cracked deprecated 1024-bit RSA keys in a few months using an academic CPU cluster, far less effort than factoring would require, and it also degrades the theoretical security of 2048- and 4096-bit keys.
A newly reported cryptanalysis technique can compromise 1,024-bit RSA encryption without fully factoring the key, requiring an estimated 1,380 CPU core-years of computation. That figure is far below the roughly 500,000 to 1 million CPU core-years previously estimated to factor such a key directly.
Stephen A. Weis says he factored a large RSA challenge number he calls RSA-896 with help from Anthropic's Claude AI model on September 19, 2026. He published the full modulus along with its two prime factors, p and q, as evidence of the result.
GPT-6 Astra decoded a previously unsolved German WWI radio message from November 27, 1918, one of dozens listed on Scienceblogs.de's catalog of unresolved ciphers. The AI used the ADFGVX encryption method with the key word 'TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG,' revealing a report about an English cruiser arriving at Sevastopol and an Allied squadron following on the 26th.
A Show HN project introduces a web tool that applies a coefficient preprocessing technique to evaluate polynomials using roughly half the multiplications required by the standard Horner's method. Users can enter a polynomial, choose a mathematical field, and the tool computes an optimized evaluation scheme, needing about floor(n/2)+1 multiplications for monic polynomials.
Security researchers, including work from SpecterOps, have documented at least 39 distinct methods that can undermine passkey authentication despite the underlying FIDO2 cryptography remaining secure. These techniques target the surrounding infrastructure rather than the cryptographic keys themselves, including browsers, operating systems, password managers, sync services, Bluetooth transport, and account recovery workflows. Many have working proof-of-concept tools, and some techniques are already surfacing in real-world attack activity.
Bernstein's cr.yp.to blog post argues that switching protocols entirely to post-quantum (PQ) cryptography, rather than combining it with existing ECC, creates unnecessary security risk. He contends that PQ implementations will inevitably contain exploitable bugs, and keeping ECC alongside PQ limits the damage those flaws can cause, at minimal extra cost.