Rsa-coin 49n1l

RSA-Coin “An Attempt to break RSA security while creating a viable alternative to Bitcoin” Alberto Armandi [email protected]

Abstract : As Bitcoin already demonstrated, “A purely peer-to-peer version would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted party is still required to prevent double spending”. [1] If the Bitcoin network power reached roughly 300 Ghash/Sec, this means there is a tremendous interest in phenomena such as “cryptocurrency”, and the political, monetary and ethic anti-government diramations that spawns from it. RSA-Coin is based on the premise that a comparable amount of power can be spent in this attempt to create an alternative to Bitcoin while breaking the RSA security, yes you heard well, read on to learn more. Where Bitcoin works by timestamping transactions and by hashing them into an on-going chain of“Proof of work” , the so called “Blockchain”, RSA-Coin will take a different approach obviously still timestamping and creating an on-going log of transactions but in doing so it will avoid a “monolithic blockchain approach”, as shown by Bitcoin. RSA-Coin will be using a simple routing and messaging system over a peer-to-peer network in a similar fashion to Bitcoin.

1.

Introduction

RSA-Coin will implement transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse using the “prime factorization problem” as its proof-of-work. “Many cryptographic protocols are based on the difficulty of factoring large composite integers or a related problem, the RSA problem. An algorithm which efficiently factors an arbitrary integer would render RSAbased public-key cryptography insecure”. [2] Avoiding Double spending will be addressed by timestamping and generating a computational proof of the chronological order of transactions which will be stored using a prefix-hash-tree.[3] The system will remain secure no matter how many, and which kind of nodes control how much U power. Duplicating a transaction will require the solution of a nearly-impossible combination of RSA-Coin proof-of-works.

2.

Proof of work

The proof of work system used will be similar to the “RSA Factoring challenge” [4], the RSA numbers, which are a set of large semiprimes [5], numbers carrying exactely two prime factors. The proof-of-work will be finding the prime factors of given RSA numbers.

The system will start with relatively small numbers and increase difficulty, use larger numbers, with the more U power being spent on the network.

3.

Mining new coins

The system, as already said, will bootstrap itself with a low difficulty, meaning it will output small numbers and the incentive for the factorization of such numbers will be proportioned to the effort spent. Once higher numbers are to be reached, difficulty will increase and so the incentive.

Conclusions and implications : The system is a work in progress, and will be released

and open-sourced when it will reach stability. The client is being coded in C# with Mono Library for cross-platform compatibility purposes. More informations about the technical details will come soon. Implications should be obvious, if RSA-Coin has any success and the network reaches a considerable size, sensitive RSA numbers, such as RSA1028, or 2048 might be factorized, and the security of organizations like banks, the ATM network, VISA, Mastercard, the list continues, might be put at risk.

References [1] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization [3] http://berkeley.intel-research.net/sylvia/pht.pdf [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiprime