Global E-commerce At Risk From Subtle Math Error In Computer Chip

San Francisco, CA (AHN) - A subtle math error could make the RSA public key algorithm vulnerable, says Adi Shamir, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and one of the designer of the RSA software that is widely used to protect e-commerce transactions from hackers.

Shamir - the S in the RSA he developed with Ronald Rivest and Leonard Adleman in 1977 - warned of a hypothetical incident in which a math error in the widely used computing chip places the security of the global electronic commerce system at risk, the New York Times reported.

Shamir said he had no evidence that anyone is using an attack like the one he described but said an obscure division bug in Intel's Pentium microprocessor was discovered in 1994 and, more recently, in a multiplication bug in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program.

Because the exact workings of microprocessor chips are protected by laws governing trade secrets, it is difficult, if not impossible, to verify that they have been correctly designed, he added.

An Intel spokesman noted that the flaw was a theoretical one and something that required a lot of contingencies.

Shamir circulated on Friday a research note about the problem to a small group of colleagues, saying the flaw would make it possible for an attacker to break the protection afforded to some electronic messages.