Can you enter an RSA key and have it produce two prime numbers?

▲ spiderice a day ago | parent | next [-]

A random tool like this would be the most entertaining possible way for something like that to be unleashed on the world

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jamestimmins a day ago | parent | next [-]

My brother once suggested that there are probably bits of code/algorithms that would be world changing if they were released in academic journals, but instead were written by some unknowing programmer in an afternoon for their job coding embedded systems for refrigerators.

This particular example may be unlikely, but it's a very fun idea.

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RobotToaster 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

An anonymous 4chan user once solved a 25 year old maths problem, to answer a question about the watch order of an anime. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-surprisingly-...

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InsideOutSanta a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Iirc, Heisenberg reinvented Matrix calculations to solve a problem in quantum physics. Not being a mathematician, he wasn't aware of the concept. Born recognized what Heisenberg had done and introduced him to his own reinvention.

	▲	geon 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		PBS Space Time released a video with that story yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-Q5r3THR3M

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Suppafly a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries, often in clunky roundabout ways. I imagine some of them figure out things not known to math, but it's far more likely to go the other way.

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Towaway69 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Folks shouldn’t be afraid to “rediscover” stuff.

Primarily because the learnings you make are the same as the original “discoverer”. Without those learnings, you might not be able to arrive at your true destination.

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Suppafly a day ago | parent [-]

>Folks shouldn’t be afraid to “rediscover” stuff.

Luckily no one is suggesting that.

	▲	geon 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A lot of people suggest that. So many that it has become an idiom. "Don't reinvent the wheel."

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nico a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries

I remember reading, about a year or two ago, about a medical doctor that published a paper rediscovering calculus (I just looked it up, it happened in 1994, there’s been many articles and videos about it)

	▲	dizhn 21 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's not clear from the Wikipedia article linked below whether she was rediscovering part of calculus or knowingly rebranding it. Do you know more details?
	▲	alexchantavy a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		lmao: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model This is such a great story

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agumonkey 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it's a fact of geographical and social independence.. so far there's no way to know what everybody did or is doing (well there's twitter but it's configured on noise rather than signal)

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RachelF a day ago | parent | prev [-]

A lot of the time engineers are focussed with solving a problem, to build a working machine/program, while academics just want to publish.

This is also true with patents.

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fouronnes3 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Jokes aside, let's say someone does figure out how to break RSA over a weekend project. The evil options are easy to come up with, but what is the actually responsible, ethical, thing to do? Never tell anyone?

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zoky a day ago | parent | next [-]

Contact a known and trusted security researcher who can verify to the world that you did what you said you did, so everyone else can have as much time as possible to figure out exactly how fucked they are. Doing nothing isn’t an option; once someone figures something like that out, it signifies that conditions were ripe for the discovery to be made, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s discovered again independently.

	▲	dizhn 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Also fairly reasonable to assume it has already been done by someone who had a motive to break it and is keeping quiet.

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sroerick 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Pretend you had developed a quantum computing advancement and push people to post quantum encryption

	▲	anonymousiam 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Migrating to post quantum encryption is important, but it's also important to not be herded into a "solution" that can be/has been easily compromised. https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html

▲ fainpul 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In Prolog you can write rules (similar to functions in other languages) so that they work "both ways". Let's say you have this rule that defines how pace ("runner's speed") relates to distance and time:

  :- use_module(library(clpr)).

  pace(Km, Minutes, Pace) :-
    { Minutes = Km * Pace }.

Even though the rule only specifies how Minutes are calculated, Prolog can now also calculate the other values.

You can query it, giving unknowns an uppercase `Name`, and it will give you the possible values for it:

  pace(5, 24.5, Pace)
  pace(40, Min, 5)
  pace(Km, 24.5, 5)
  pace(Km, Time, 5)

You can try it here: https://swish.swi-prolog.org/

So if you had a rule that defines RSA key calculation this way, you could enter a key and get all valid solutions for the primes. But of course complex calculations still take a long time. I assume it's similar to a brute force attack in that way (Prolog has clever strategies to explore the solution space though).

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in Prolog or cryptography, so this might not be 100% accurate.

▲ yonatan8070 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or enter a public key + some encrypted data to get the private key