A long time ago I read an account on a website of a test done in the 90s on public RSA keys. A keyserver operator was politely asked for the entire database of public keys, and he complied (I think it was the MIT keyserver and the researchers were at MIT, but I don't recall.)
The public keys were all analyzed and compared efficiently pairwise (computing the GCD I believe) to see if by some small chance a factorization would occur. And it did - I recall the website saying it was a very strange scenario with one of the keys not actually being correctly semiprime and having several small factors. I was never able to find the website giving this account again. But the idea seems to be coming back with this paper: http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/477.pdf NTRU is a fast public key cryptosystem presented in 1996 by Hoffstein, Pipher and Silverman. It operates in the ring of truncated polynomials. In NTRU, a public key is a polynomial defined by the combination of two private polynomials. In this paper, we consider NTRU with two different public keys defined by different private keys. We present a lattice-based attack to recover the private keys assuming that the public keys share polynomials with a suitable number of common coefficients. -tom _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
