Ruby Crypto Vulnerability Exposes Risks in RSA Key Encryption Methods

The Ruby developers had a near miss with a crypto disaster when an "awful bug" crept into the language's source code development tree. A simple programming error made the library generate RSA keys that caused the encryption mechanism to produce clear text. Luckily, the error was caught before it made it to any release version of Ruby, but it provides a good example of how a simple error can have potentially far-reaching effects.

The RSA asymmetric encryption technique differentiates between secret and public keys. The public key consist of a modulus n and an exponent e. The plain text, m, is encrypted according to the mathematical formula

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