Math Error Could Compromise Cryptographic Systems
A highly respected cryptographer warned on Friday that the increasing sophistication of computer chip design raises the risk that undetected bugs could be used to crack public key encryption systems. The warning was issued by Adi Shamir, a professor at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science. The "S" in RSA, one such public key encryption algorithm, belongs to Shamir.
"With the increasing word size and sophisticated optimizations of multiplication units in modern microprocessors, it becomes increasingly likely that they contain some undetected bugs," Shamir said in his note. "This was demonstrated by the accidental discovery of the obscure Pentium division bug in the mid 1990's, and by the recent discovery of a multiplication bug in the Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Excel program."
