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Comment by a1k0n | Hacker News Reader

Hm, that's possible. A comprehensive search over 4 million pairs would be O(16 trillion) operations, so perhaps they gain something by reusing intermediate steps of the gcd, or something? Good point, I'm not sure. The brute-force solution is still not out of the question for a modestly large map-reduce cluster.

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Yeah, regarding going ahead with the "naive" search, I'm coming up with a price of 5k to 15k on Amazon EC2 using the cluster compute 8XL instances, and under a month using 10 machines.

Considering the potential value of some of those rsa keys, that is a quite minimal investment. This might be an in the wild danger pretty quickly.

The chances of any one key being compromised are very, very low.

If this is a pattern of simple software flaws, or something environmental like keys generating during cold start entropy starvation, the likelihood of pulling a truly valuable key out of that soup are even lower: generally (not always, but generally) the more valuable keys are generated using very well known software, and under tight process constraints.

So basically you get ~10k random certs that allow you to MITM ~10k random sites. It's not nothing, but criminals have better ways of monetizing attacker effort.

A lot does depend on the actual circumstances for the bad RNG. If you had a good method of recognizing the valuable sites (anything involving money or maybe email?) it might be more practical considering a botnet would be just fine for this sort of computation.

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