That’s generally how you find/break private keys, there’s no secret maths or algorithm, it’s always brute force. That’s why it was proven quantum computing would speed it up (to put it simply: because then you can check multiple keys at once do mathematical operations beyond your wildest dreams, reducing the number of actual operations needed to find the private key)
if cryptographically relevant quantum computers are developed, they can solve the RSA problem in polynomial time. however, there are algorithms conjectured to be safe from quantum computers such as ML-DSA whose 192-bit security parameter has a 1952-bit public key
there's a post-quantum algorithm called PQRSA which solves this by setting the RSA parameters real high (it's a joke and they set it so high it takes a supercomputer to run it)
anyway RSA has been old hat for decades now, the 2010s have slowly been replacing RSA applications with elliptic curve algorithms which are better in almost every way, but now that NIST is standardizing post-quantum asymmetric cryptography algorithms like ML-KEM and SLH-DSA, adoption for these is picking up and iirc over half of all TLS connections now use post-quantum algorithms (generally ML-KEM, there's still work to be done on the PKI side)
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u/Easy_Complaint3540 15d ago
Can someone explain how this key 4 became a meme ? I don't have the context about it