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An Attempt to break RSA security while creating a viable alternative to Bitcoin Alberto Armandi alberto.armandi@gmail.com
1.
Introduction
RSA-Coin will implement transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse using the prime factorization problem as its proof-of-work. Many cryptographic protocols are based on the difficulty of factoring large composite integers or a related problem, the RSA problem. An algorithm which efficiently factors an arbitrary integer would render RSAbased public-key cryptography insecure. [2] Avoiding Double spending will be addressed by timestamping and generating a computational proof of the chronological order of transactions which will be stored using a prefix-hash-tree.[3] The system will remain secure no matter how many, and which kind of nodes control how much CPU power. Duplicating a transaction will require the solution of a nearly-impossible combination of RSA-Coin proof-of-works.
2.
Proof of work
The proof of work system used will be similar to the RSA Factoring challenge [4], the RSA numbers, which are a set of large semiprimes [5], numbers carrying exactely two prime factors. The proof-of-work will be finding the prime factors of given RSA numbers.
The system will start with relatively small numbers and increase difficulty, use larger numbers, with the more CPU power being spent on the network.
3.
The system, as already said, will bootstrap itself with a low difficulty, meaning it will output small numbers and the incentive for the factorization of such numbers will be proportioned to the effort spent. Once higher numbers are to be reached, difficulty will increase and so the incentive.
Conclusions and implications : The system is a work in progress, and will be released
and open-sourced when it will reach stability. The client is being coded in C# with Mono Library support for cross-platform compatibility purposes. More informations about the technical details will come soon. Implications should be obvious, if RSA-Coin has any success and the network reaches a considerable size, sensitive RSA numbers, such as RSA1028, or 2048 might be factorized, and the security of organizations like banks, the ATM network, VISA, Mastercard, the list continues, might be put at risk.
References
[1] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization [3] http://berkeley.intel-research.net/sylvia/pht.pdf [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiprime