Breaking Public Keys - How to Determine an Unknown RSA Public Modulus.
Hans-Joachim Knobloch · 2012
Not surprisingly, the common use of any public key crypto system involves publishing the public key and keeping the private key secret. There are however a few applications where both the private and public key are kept secret, thereby effectively converting a public key crypto algorithm to a symmetric algorithm. We show that if the RSA cryptosystem is used in such a symmetric application, it is possible to determine the public RSA modulus if the public exponent is known and short, such as 3 or F4=65537, and two or more plaintext/ciphertext (or, if RSA is used for signing, signed value/signature) pairs are known. 1