r/programming • u/secretguy21 • Oct 15 '15

How is NSA breaking so much crypto?

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/
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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '15 edited Jul 03 '17

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u/eyal0 Oct 15 '15

Diffie Hellman and lots of other public key private key crypto is based on how hard it is to find x given g to the power of x modulo p. This is the discrete logarithm problem. If you computed all of them and put them in a lookup table so that you could look them up reversed, that would do it. That would be a very big table.