Mathematical advances strengthen IT security
Rapidly rising cyber crime and the growing prospect of the Internet being used as a medium for terrorist attacks pose a major challenge for IT security. Cryptography is central to this challenge, since it underpins privacy, confidentiality, and identity, which together provide the fabric for e-commerce and secure communications. Cryptography since the beginning of the Internet has been based extensively on the RSA public key system, used for digital signatures and the exchange of private keys that in turn encrypt message content. The RSA cryptosystem, introduced by Rivest, Shamir, and Adlement in 1977, relies for its security on the difficulty of working out the factors dividing large integers (whole numbers). RSA has performed well until now, but the level of protection it provides has been eroded by constant efforts to develop more efficient methods for breaking it...
