RSA Performance and Low Hamming Weight Small Prime Public Exponent
Soram Ranbir, Santosh Sharma Kongbrailatpam, Haobijam Jina Devi, Takhellambam Sonamani, Naorem Natasha, Sapam Jitu · 2025
When it comes to cryptography, RSA is one of the most used algorithms. It is still cryptographically secure when signing data over the internet. A study carried out on 582 servers (including 253 financial servers) by the authors in October and November of 2024 found that, despite the growing number of digital certificates based on elliptic curves, 83.4% of the servers still use RSA algorithms, compared to just 11.5% that use elliptic curve-based algorithms, and the remaining 5% that use both. Although RSA is mathematically secure, protocols and implementations of RSA may still create a security lapse. We believe there are a number of reasons for this security breach, such as the usage of flawed keys created from weak primes, which occurred with "DigiCert Certificates" in 2019. In this paper, we have conducted an experimental analysis of RSA's performance and talked about the potential benefits and vulnerabilities of using a low Hamming weight small prime public exponent in RSA.