Cryptography researchers demonstrated a method to forge certain RSA signatures without recovering the private key, using a variant of the special number field sieve algorithm combined with an oracle found in some blind-signature protocols. The attack is practical against deprecated 1,024-bit keys and reduces the estimated security margin of 2,048-bit and 4,096-bit keys in vulnerable blind-signature systems, while standard RSA implementations using PKCS or PSS padding appear unaffected.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-28
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.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-26
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.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-24
Researcher Eric Lu and Cognition's Devin AI coding agents built a new GPU-based lattice sieving tool and used it to factor RSA-260, a 260-digit number, beating the previous RSA Factoring Challenge record of RSA-250 set in 2020. The team says the approach runs factoring workloads at roughly 10 times lower cost than prior public methods.
cognition.com
· 2026-09-09
A security researcher extracted decades-old root certificates bundled with early Netscape and Internet Explorer browser installers from archive.org, using an LLM to catalog them. Among the finds was a 512-bit RSA certificate authority key shipped in Netscape 4.51 in 1999, trusted for both SSL and S/MIME, which the researcher then successfully factored using modern computing power.
mcpherrin.ca
· 2026-09-08
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