[ale] 4 of 1000 public keys provide no security

[George Allen]

Judging by this, Could there be a potential to make rainbow tables vs.
SSL keys?!

>From ARS:

An astonishing four out of every 1,000 public keys protecting webmail,
online banking, and other sensitive online services provide no
cryptographic security, a team of mathematicians has found. The
research is the latest to reveal limitations in the tech used by more
than a million Internet sites to prevent eavesdropping.

The finding, reported in a paper (PDF) submitted to a cryptography
conference in August, is based on the analysis of some 7.1 million
1024-bit RSA keys published online. By subjecting what's known as the
"modulus" of each public key to an algorithm first postulated more
than 2,000 years ago by the Greek mathematician Euclid, the
researchers looked for underlying factors that were used more than
once. Almost 27,000 of the keys they examined were cryptographically
worthless because one of the factors used to generate them was used by
at least one other key.

"The fact is, if these numbers had the entropy that they were supposed
to have, the probability of even one of these events happening in 7
million public keys would be vanishingly small," James P. Hughes, an
independent cryptographer who participated in the research, told Ars.
"We thought that was rather startling."

...

The revelation that such a large proportion of public keys were
generated with a prime factor shared by one or more other keys means
that such keys are trivial to break by anyone who can identify them.
What's more, the percentage of keys known to be generated with
non-unique factors is likely to grow as more keys are analyzed. The
0.38 percentage rate of faulty keys found when the researchers looked
at 7.1 million total keys compares with a 0.26 percent rate in an
earlier analysis that considered only 4.7 million RSA moduli. As a
result, the true number of keys that could be broken using the
technique may be higher than the current research reveals.

...

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/crypto-shocker-four-of-every-1000-public-keys-provide-no-security.ars?src=fbk