undefined | Better HN

0 pointsgoalieca5y ago0 comments

> RSA is half a century old and it's still up to date by modern standards. In fact nobody has came up with anything better.

RSA is currently a minefield of gotchas and few security companies even get it right. Just generating a good key is actually a very difficult task. It is also very computationally slow and has many practical issues for the level of security it provides.

There are many superior replacements in both pqc and elliptic spaces. I would take EdDSA over rsa-pss any day of the week.

0 comments

user59944615y ago

RSA is extremely simple, it's just multiplications and powers. It can be reasonably explained to high school students. The tooling is mature and keys are trivial to generate safely with a openssl command.

EdDSA is another level entirely. I don't know how you can recommend elliptic curve cryptography with a straight face if you think RSA is hard.

P.S. It's a myth that EdDSA is faster. This depends on operation (signing vs verification) and key size.

goaliecaOP5y ago

Elliptic curves are also quite simple. Computing a public key boils down to point addition with a modulus.

The private key is a byte string and the quality of it only depends on the random generator. It’s trivially fast to generate 32 bytes of decent quality random numbers these days. There are many insecure rsa generation methods with weak criteria. Too many are fossilized in libraries and crypto cores. Rsa also has half a dozen padding schemes and most are now considered weak or vulnerable.

EC is generally considered much stronger for a much smaller key size.

upofadown5y ago

Note that we are talking about a single RSA operation. So attacks that require repeated trials are not relevant here.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse