Question

Deo has been asked to explain RSA to his colleague. After his explanation, Deo is asked what, if any, weaknesses RSA has. How would Deo respond?

a. As computers become more powerful, the ability to compute factoring has increased.
b. RSA weaknesses are based on ECC.
c. The digest produced by the RSA algorithm is too short to be secure.
d. RSA has no known weaknesses.

Answer 1

The RSA encryption algorithm has weaknesses, including the increase in computing power making factoring easier and the reliance on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. Despite these weaknesses, RSA is widely used and has no known practical attacks.

Step-by-step explanation:

RSA, which stands for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, is a widely used encryption algorithm in computer science and cryptography. While RSA is a secure algorithm, it does have some weaknesses. One of the weaknesses is that as computers become more powerful, the ability to compute factoring has increased. This means that it could become easier for attackers to break the RSA encryption by factoring large numbers.

Another weakness of RSA is that it relies on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. If someone discovers a efficient algorithm for factorization, RSA would become vulnerable to attack.

Despite these weaknesses, RSA remains one of the most widely used encryption algorithms due to its effectiveness and the lack of any known practical attacks.