DeepMind AI agents cut the cost of attacking 1024-bit RSA
Working with cryptographers from UC San Diego and Inria, Google DeepMind's agents found cheaper ways to forge RSA-1024 signatures and to factor many keys of the same size. The researchers say only obsolete systems are affected.
Google DeepMind says AI agents working under human supervision found two ways to make attacking 1024-bit RSA cheaper. The work was done with cryptographers from UC San Diego and Inria, and the company's own summary is that it only matters for systems nobody should still be running.
Pushmeet Kohli, VP at Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Google Cloud, said the results "only affect obsolete 1024-bit RSA systems," and that protocols using 2048-bit or larger keys remain secure.
The first finding is about signatures and padding. Padding was thought to make forgery harder, but DeepMind found the protection depends on how much of the signed block an attacker controls. Once they control roughly half of the block or more, Kohli said, padding adds no protection at all. The paper ties this to the PKCS#1 v1.5 format used by the PKCS#11 signing interface on devices such as hardware security modules.
In a sandboxed test, the agents re-ran an earlier academic forgery attack on the same 1024-bit key and cut CPU time 3.5-fold: 391 CPU core-years against 1,380 in the original study. Two agents designed, ran and debugged the computation in under four days, with about 20 messages from the human researcher, mostly approvals. The key was not factored.
The attack doesn't recover the private key. It needs roughly 4 billion signing queries made in advance, and it doesn't work against devices that hash messages internally.
The second finding covers factoring many keys of the same size, where one large upfront computation can be shared. The agents' algorithm makes each additional 1024-bit key roughly 30 times cheaper on average than the best previous approach. That's a theoretical estimate, it assumes an initial computation as costly as factoring one key, and the method hasn't been implemented.
If you're still holding RSA-1024 anywhere, this is the nudge to inventory it. For everyone on 2048-bit and up, the practical change today is small.
Sources
- Google DeepMind’s AI Agents Make 1024-Bit RSA Keys Cheaper to AttackPrimarywww.securityweek.com
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