Cryptic conversations, Episode 2. Keegan Ryan

"RSA is dead". That was the word on the street on early March, when a paper titled Fast Factoring Integers by SVP algorithms was posted on eprint.iacr.org. Had this been true we would face unimaginable consequences. For some hours people were confused as to whether the claims on the paper are true.

Fortunately the confusion didn't last too long. Several experts around the world immediately took the task to understand, analyze and implement the claims in said paper. One of these experts is Keegan Ryan, a PhD student at UCSD specialized in lattice methods for cryptanalysis. In this episode Keegan demystifies the contents, and explains whether or not the algorithm could be used in practice.

Spoiler: RSA will live to see another day.