Ask HN: What happens if a fast integer factorization method is discovered?
I am not a mathematician, but this seems like something that might have crossed the minds of math savvy people. Yes, this seems extremely unlikely, but as a thought experiment, what would come next?
Given the impact and implications this would have:
- How would anyone even go about publishing anything like this without literally breaking the world?
- Would this actually break the world?
- What if they were malicious? Could something like this sneak under the radar and escape to the dark web to be exploited by criminals?
- What if they were not malicious, but had non-scientific (cough) monetary, goals in mind, would there even be a way to somehow milk this?
- What if they were a scientist, purest of heart, how would they go about this?
- Wouldn't this have to be done anonymously for personal security reasons?
Watching the humanity over the past few years has been.. illuminating. I am not sure we are even remotely close to being set up to handle something like this.
What do you think? There is at least one [science fiction] short story where this happens. Greg Egan, maybe? There is a fast quantum factorization method, Shor's Algorithm. As far as we know, it is not yet practical. However, there is ongoing work on post-quantum cryptography that would be safe against such attacks. The most likely users for a fast factorization algorithm that could break RSA encryption are nation-states. They would obviously keep this capability secret. Nation-states have compromised many systems anyway, without needing to break this kind of cryptography. We are not really set up to handle this either. P != NP ... but answering your questions would make a great techno-thriller story.