Interesting post on RSA, a type of encryption that allows the key used to encrypt messages to be shared publicly. It works thanks to the difficulty of factoring the product of large prime numbers. We rely on public key encryption approaches like RSA everytime we use a secure internet connection, for instance to share credit card details or check our GP record.
Martin Gardner posed a factorisation problem in 1977, which was solved in 1993 with the help of ~600 people and ~1600 computers. The solution was used to decrypt a message, which turned out to be the title of this post. In 2025, the problem was solved again in 47 minutes using 8 CPUs on Google Cloud.
Bigger numbers lead to more secure encryption; however, quantum computers threaten to destroy the whole approach, hence the development of post-quantum cryptography.
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2025, August 8). The magic words are squeamish ossifrage [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/the-magic-words-are-squeamish-ossifrage/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀