You might be tempted to use that shiny new prime number for RSA encryption. Don't do it. RSA encryption uses the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers to make sure hackers can ...

The bolding is mine, because if in fact the agency did crack the encryption schemes used for bank transactions (the Times is somewhat unclear on that point), then in doing so it may have solved a math ...

Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...

RSA encryption is a major foundation of digital security and is one of the most commonly used forms of encryption, and yet it operates on a brilliantly simple premise: it's easy to multiply two large ...

A large chunk of the global economy now rests on public key cryptography. We generally agree that with long enough keys, it is infeasible to crack things encoded that way. Until such time as it isn’t, ...

When sending your credit card number through a public medium, such as the Internet, your financial credibility may be compromised if the number is not first encrypted. It is impossible to tell who may ...

As computers and math techniques become more powerful and sophisticated, current encryption standards could be made obsolete in as little as five years The strength of the encryption used now to ...