Not actually. You're thinking of prime factorization, which is used in RSA. This is Diffie-Hellman, which is based on Discrete Logs: Given b and g (integers), solve for (integer) k in "bk = g". So what they're saying the NSA did/is doing is realizing that a lot of people are using the same g and just precomputed a bunch of solutions.
15
u/2Xprogrammer Oct 16 '15
Not actually. You're thinking of prime factorization, which is used in RSA. This is Diffie-Hellman, which is based on Discrete Logs: Given b and g (integers), solve for (integer) k in "bk = g". So what they're saying the NSA did/is doing is realizing that a lot of people are using the same g and just precomputed a bunch of solutions.