I wouldn’t be excessively surprised if someone found a regularity in a common pseudorandom generator algorithm that could be exploited to narrow down the search for the prime numbers used for RSA keys.
This would fall under “breaking some implementations of RSA” and not “breaking RSA”, but is close enough for practical purposes that your colleague might be right (or at least, not be in a seperate cast-iron category of “wrong”, especially if you also consider quantum computing arguments).
My quibble wasn’t whether he was right or wrong about the breakability of RSA. It was that the answer to the question sits on other notoriously open questions which can in principle be fundamentally solved one way or the other, and which you can’t just pull an answer out of your arse for.
I wouldn’t be excessively surprised if someone found a regularity in a common pseudorandom generator algorithm that could be exploited to narrow down the search for the prime numbers used for RSA keys.
This would fall under “breaking some implementations of RSA” and not “breaking RSA”, but is close enough for practical purposes that your colleague might be right (or at least, not be in a seperate cast-iron category of “wrong”, especially if you also consider quantum computing arguments).
My quibble wasn’t whether he was right or wrong about the breakability of RSA. It was that the answer to the question sits on other notoriously open questions which can in principle be fundamentally solved one way or the other, and which you can’t just pull an answer out of your arse for.