I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

	I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s(mcpherrin.ca)
	487 points by ahlCVA 2 days ago \| 123 comments
	tl;dr: The author factored two 512-bit RSA root CA keys from the defunct Canadian CA "E-Certify" that shipped in Netscape 4.51 in 1999, using CADO-NFS on a Ryzen 9 5950X in about 30 hours each. They also cracked a 512-bit VeriSign test code-signing CA from IE 3.02 (done on GPU in ~1 hour). The recovered private keys, tools, and a demo TLS server compatible with Netscape 4.51 are published on GitHub, illustrating how weak early Web PKI standards were even by contemporary cryptographic norms.
	HN Discussion: ↑Reinforces how comically weak 512-bit keys were even by 1999 standards ↑Reflects on broader implications like harvest-now-decrypt-later surveillance of past traffic ↑Nostalgic appreciation for reverse-engineering childhood-era tech ↓Criticism of the author's reliance on unverified LLM output in the writeup •Curiosity/questions about historical expectations and technical context