A group of researchers (Arjen Lenstra and collaborators  from EPFL Lausanne and James Hughes from Palo Alto) published a study, Ron was wrong Whit is right, of new vulnerabilities of cryptosystems. The New York Times picked up the story. Although Lenstra et al discuss several cryptosystems, their results are particularly relevant to those based on RSA. The title mirrors their conviction that cryptosystems based on a single random element have fewer key generation problems than RSA, that uses two random primes.The technical problem they identify...

Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.Unicode was...