Mathematical breathrough could destroy e-commerce

Lincoln Russell 7 Sep, 2004 at 8:33am ET Article published in Tech

A mathematical breakthrough regarding prime numbers could invalidate internet security measures. The Riemann hypothesis is one of seven ‘milennium problems’ for which there is a $1 million reward for solving.

The proof should give us more understanding of how the primes work. If it does, it will bring the whole of ecommerce to its knees, overnight. So there are very big implications.

Source: vnunet.com

Comments

7 Sep 2004 ~ 8:47am primesuspect Read the article. This sounds like more hype than reality.... What is with the media? Sheesh!
7 Sep 2004 ~ 10:34am EMT There isn't nearly enough detail in the article to make such a claim. I guess I'll just look up the Riemann hypothesis when I get the chance; if anyone else finds more info please post a link.
7 Sep 2004 ~ 10:44am gibbonsl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_hypothesis

here is a good one
7 Sep 2004 ~ 10:52am TheBaron I swear there was already a post about this here, but for the life of me I can't find it
7 Sep 2004 ~ 11:45am MediaMan The VU Net story is poor at best. A lot of the media do post stories that are headline grabbers with no real substance.

Nowhere in that story does it explain or hint at how eCommerce could be brought to its knees. Perhaps there's no simple way to explain it but from what I read in the other links it appears that the theory could predict random numbers. In a sense...random ecommerce codes would no longer be classified as random...since the theory could predict them.

This could mean that randomly generated codes, passwords, etc (and encryption to a certain degree) could be cracked by prediction.

I guess, if I'm right in my interpretation, that could have been included in the story.

But for now...I classify the VU Net story as a chicken little.
7 Sep 2004 ~ 11:47am Templar Related article. The Poincare Conjecture (No idea what it is..) has an outstanding theory for it right now (Note, not proven), and is also one of the 7 Millinium Problems...
7 Sep 2004 ~ 1:00pm EMT TheBaron: Yeah, there definitely was.

MediaMan: My guess is it has more to do with factoring a product of prime numbers to crack encryption algorithms rather than random number generation (for which there are a multitude of ways).

Thanks for the link gibbonsl
7 Sep 2004 ~ 8:03pm Mizugori its about encryption. i don't totally understand it myself, but apparently most if not all encryption is based upon certain mathematical equations that were thought to be un-solvable (is that a word?). So all of the sites using encryption to protect your credit cards (which means all of them basically) could be in trouble if someone can crack the problems and thus predict the character series used by an encrypted piece of data.