- #1
ramollari
- 437
- 1
The RSA encryption algorithm that makes use of public keys, is widely used in secure communications such as e-commerce. It depends on the fact that you can multiply two very big prime numbers to get a product, but someone else cannot get back those prime numbers (factorize the product) directly. Why is this the case? There has been news that a French mathematician named De Branges has done an ingenious work in proving a theorem that we can count how many prime numbers are smaller than a given natural number. To him this implies that the job of factorizing the product of two big prime numbers becomes easy enough. If this were the case it would bring enormous consequences to contemporary security, encryption and confidentiality. It would freeze secure Internet transactions that depend on the RSA algorithm. I don't know to what extent the proof of De Branges will make the job of factorizing easier.