I was the product manager with responsibility for root certificates in the Netscape 4.51 browser. It's crazy to see someone factor it 25 years later.<p>Just to reply to some people in the comments. Yes, we knew export grade encryption was weak - that was the point - that the NSA could decrypt it - and the govt. required us to do it anyway.<p>FWIW - we had the goal of expanding the list of root authorities in the 4.5x release - and this might have been the first release to monetize the root slots because Netscape was under severe pressure to generate revenue.<p>(Also - Verisign hated that we were expanding competition and tried to convince us to implement a program that would re-restrict the list to a set of "responsible" companies aka Verisign and one or two others. We declined.)
Its a shame that Microsoft ate Netscape's lunch so early on. I still use Firefox and have fond memories of Netscape (v7) when growing up.
Fascinating! My involvement in this space starts much later, so it’s always interesting to hear from folks involved at the time. The rumours about monetizing the root program is one I’ve heard repeated but never anything concrete.<p>These days with the CA/Browser forum, CCADB, and openly run root programs from Mozilla, Chrome and others, this is all much better documented than what went on in the early days, so I definitely have some strong historical interest in what came before.
Did you have any personal interaction with NSA or their proxies?
I owned the "broker FTP" service at a hedge fund.<p>There was a project in 2021 to talk to the banks and brokers that we connected and ask them to upgrade their keys and ciphers to modern versions.<p>IIRC, the oldest key/cipher was from the late 2000s so it wouldn't surprise me if someone is using RSA keys from the 90s somewhere.<p>You can read more about how hedge funds use FTP here:
<a href="https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1809579426687983657?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1809579426687983657?s=20</a><p>Or listen to patio11 and I talk about these systems in general here:
<a href="https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/two-banks-cant-agree-on-fourth-grade-math/" rel="nofollow">https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/two-banks-can...</a>
A bit unfortunate that so many of the interesting bits were left to ai. I would've enjoyed some commentary on why the custom TLS implementation was necessary. Oh well.<p>Update: found this explanation in a comment at the top of the (surprisingly short) Go file in the linked repo:<p>The target client is Netscape Communicator 4.51 (both the 40-bit export build and the 128-bit US build) with its clock set to the year 2000.<p>Go's crypto/tls cannot help: it dropped SSLv3 in Go 1.14, never accepted the SSLv2-compatible ClientHello that Netscape 4 sends, and never had RC4-MD5 or the 40-bit export suites. So this file carries its own tiny SSLv3 server-side implementation on top of stdlib primitives (RSA PKCS#1 v1.5, RC4, DES, 3DES, MD5, SHA-1). The server key is 512-bit RSA so that export clients can encrypt the premaster secret to it directly, without a ServerKeyExchange.
(As the author of the post)<p>I've written and worked on a few TLS implementations, so it wasn't terribly interesting to me. And I have to go to work tomorrow and solve real, modern CA problems :)<p>But in short, I wanted to use Go, and it doesn't support SSLv3, the SSLv2 Client Hello, or the 40-bit RC4-MD5 export-grade cipher suites which I wanted to support too.<p>I was more shocked that I managed to get stock OpenSSL to issue a certificate that worked. There's a number of things that didn't work there, too. You can find my scars in mkcert.sh in the repo. Perhaps all of this is worthy of a follow-up post.<p>I could have tried to get some old server running instead, but I wouldn't have wanted to deploy that on the internet, even on an isolated Fly VM.
I bet all the certificate metadata shown in the „View a certificate“ popup window is vulnerable to cross-site scripting. Back then you probably wouldn’t get a <script> tag through a CA's review process and I found such a problem in Netscape's image „About page“ popup.
If it were vulnerable to XSS, why would you even want it properly signed by a CA?
People almost never inspect the certificates of working websites, the only time they might look at it is when it fails validation.
Strange seeing how people have such a hard time seeing others using AI and seem to want to complain about it instead of just, well, asking AI why something was likely done a way. It works both ways my dudes, experts don’t need to explain every last detail, prompt a bot with the context until <i>you</i> understand.<p>From my prospective, the outputs of a bot aren’t the interesting bits, it’s the input prompt that should warrant more attention.
Probably because modern libraries dropped support for ancient insecure SSL. Backwards compatibility is really not a valued thing for that area.
A while back I helped a friend (read: dumped a bunch of compute power into it) brute force the SSL keys for Sega's "Phantasy Star Online" Dreamcast game.<p>They used a similar kind of custom (and flawed) TLS implementation in their game(s) which allowed signing new certificates after brute forcing.<p>The benefit to this is that users can now play these games without needing to burn a new CD with either the SSL certs swapped, or the code patched to dummy out the checks. A "retail CD" will simply work with private servers now.<p>I've also been on the other side of the fence, building a "retro internet" service [1] has meant trying to <i>implement</i> ancient SSL/TLS services for things and people that want to use them on the network.<p>Getting modern OpenSSL (aka what ships in Debian) to even accept these ciphers, let alone keys that short is an uphill battle. Understandably, they're disabled by default and (in Debian at least) the cipher support isn't even compiled into the binary! This requires building a custom OpenSSL to build Nginx against to serve ancient SSL.<p>Presumably for the OP this kind of work was either outside of their realm of knowledge, or simply "easier" to outsource to the slop machine. Though I hope the machine they're running their demo TLS implementation on is separated completely from their own network. Rolling your own crypto libraries is always a bad idea [2] and I doubt LLM's have "improved" that<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSJsGNIDjtc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSJsGNIDjtc</a><p>[2] <a href="https://soatok.blog/2025/01/31/hell-is-overconfident-developers-writing-encryption-code/" rel="nofollow">https://soatok.blog/2025/01/31/hell-is-overconfident-develop...</a>
> A while back I helped a friend (read: dumped a bunch of compute power into it) brute force the SSL keys for Sega's "Phantasy Star Online" Dreamcast game.<p>Is there anything published online about this? It looks like the Sylverant website still requires patching the game.<p><a href="https://sylverant.net/connecting-to-sylverant/" rel="nofollow">https://sylverant.net/connecting-to-sylverant/</a>
(I have next to zero knowledge of matters crypto)<p>“Presumably for the OP this kind of work was either outside of their realm of knowledge,”<p>Unnecessary? I don’t even follow the statement’s framing even if I validated the apparent nerdswipe tendency.
“Rolling your own crypto libraries is always a bad idea”<p>Absolutes like this aren’t absolutely true.<p>It’s interesting because in a related comment, someone claimed that I was “rolling my own crypto” <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37368245">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37368245</a><p>>>>a few odd coding decisions, such as rolling your own crypto (RNG)<<<<p>Let me give some context here. MaraDNS is a DNS server that’s been around for a very long time, since 2001. There has never been, in those 25 years, any security holes found having to do with the RNG code used by MaraDNS. MaraDNS originally used an AES variant for the RNG; when DJB found cache timing attacks a little over two decades ago, I revised the AES-based RNG code to minimize the impact of such impacts, making the code slower and more complicated. So, about two decades ago, I implemented a new RNG based on RadioGatún, an algorithm which isn’t vulnerable to cache timing attacks and, indeed, has no known attacks which break its cryptographic claims, even though those claims were made over two decades ago.<p>My code has been extensively audited by multiple AI-based security researchers, and while they found two minor issues with the DNS-over-TCP code in the recursive resolver, and a minor issue with the RFC8482 reply in the recursive resolver, no issues have ever been found with the RNG code in MaraDNS (except the issue with possible cache timing attacks I fixed myself after learning about them). [1]<p>In the same time period, OpenSSL has had a large number of security issues, security advisories, and so on. OpenSSL has had countless security holes and patches in the last two decades (Heartbleed, etc.); MaraDNS has had precisely 0 known issues with its RNG code in the same time period. If I had relied on OpenSSL to keep MaraDNS’s cryptography secure, it would had been exposed to many more attacks than it has, since the code I rolled myself ended up being far more secure than using the code in a third party library.<p>Point being, it <i>is</i> possible for someone to roll their own secure RNG. I wouldn’t do so in a corporate context, for the simple reason management often times puts unreasonable time constraints on developers, but for an open source project developed on my own timeline, it can be, in fact it has been very secure.<p>Also: I was never exposed to the Lastpass breach because, instead of using Lastpass, I rolled my own secure website password generator. [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://samboy.github.io/MaraDNS/webpage/security.html" rel="nofollow">https://samboy.github.io/MaraDNS/webpage/security.html</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/samboy/PassGen" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/samboy/PassGen</a>
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Oh, I have *<i>strong*</i> opinions about the slop machine. But I try to temper them so I don't get buried by the usual "pro AI" mob<p>I will say that my projects have a "leading the pack" anti-AI policy [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/AI_Policy" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/AI_Policy</a>
The slop machine gives answers to your questions. It hallucinates so it's recommended to verify what it says. Shit in, shit out. If you have no idea whatsoever and can't use other sources to verify claims, well, get a different job I guess.
Basically 2 days on a consumer GPU to crack a 512 bit cert. The thing is much of the traffic back then did not use ephemeral keys. Most of it wasn't even encrypted at all! But about a decade later, it became normal to encrypt everything. I do wonder which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later when decryption can happen.
Even if they were using the total yearly production of tapes, depending on the estimate you choose, that ~100EB is still only something like 1/50th of yearly internet traffic. Much more realistic to assume if it was worth saving in the first place they established a side channel instead.
It's possible symmetric encryption may never really be defeated by anything other than brute force. The exchange of the ephemeral key really is the important part, as you mention. Thankfully looks like we are getting closer to full adoption of post quantum TLS... but that doesn't help recorded communications before very recently. Scary thought.<p>Looks like 70% of cloudflare requests are using post-quantum TLS! <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum" rel="nofollow">https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum</a>
This makes me wonder why we aren't using pre-shared keys as one extra layer of defense.<p>The idea would be to use an existing connection (established via normal TLS) to agree upon and exchange a pre-shared key. For subsequent connections, that key would be incorporated as one extra input to the key derivation function, and a new key would be derived.<p>This would make TLS more secure against adversaries who can break asymmetric encryption (now or later) and monitor some of your communications, but who do not have access to all of your communications. If you managed to get on an unmonitored network even once (foreign hotel WiFi, coffee shop without a wiretap), and securely establish a PSK there, all future interactions would be inaccessible to an adversary who can't break symmetric crypto.
> which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later<p>Probably not too many, because anonymous political speech from 10+ years ago isn't that interesting. Punishing people a decade after the fact isn't very effective for anything.
Activists 10 years ago are probably still linked to interesting people the government wants to survey though, even if they are maybe less active now
Activists typically aren't secretive about their actions, on the contrary they tend to be as public as they can safely be. The setup though might be, if it's to prepare an event that might be crushed down before it even take place, but then even a day later, not even a decade, to decipher would be too late and thus pointless.
> Punishing people a decade after the fact isn't very effective for anything.<p>It sends a very clear message: even if it takes a decade, we will find you and punish you.
It could potentially have blackmail material.
Blackmail/ influencing elections. Find the presidential candidate's post when he was 14 and said something racist or edgy and use that as leverage or kick him out of the race.
The linked CADO-NFS Inria page makes no mention of GPUs, and nor does its downloads page, which makes me think that TFA's factoring was done purely on CPUs. If so, there could still be considerable speedup on the table!<p>The CADO-NFS page gives some benchmark results for 16 threads, suggesting the algorithm parallelises at least somewhat well.
I didn't use any GPUs, but Steve Weis (who factored the final key at the bottom of the post) did. He's posted about that factoring setup over on <a href="https://x.com/sweis/status/2095570645505700165" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/sweis/status/2095570645505700165</a>
CPU?
> I don’t have any good reason to do that, but it seems like fun.<p>What better reason is there to do something than it being fun?
I womder if you could do the old Lotus Notes weak non-US Keys now, and if there are any old .nsf files floating around to be decrypted.
That SSL report with four different automatic 'F's is an amazing punchline
Great writeup. The fact that CADO-NFS still takes 32 hours on a 5950X for a 512-bit key that's trivial by today's academic standards really puts into perspective how comically undersized these were even for 1999 — RSA-155 fell that same year. Also love that verifying against real Netscape 4.51 ended up being harder than the factoring itself.
I am not a cryptography expert but I am interested in the field. Having said that: I am lately having an hard time understanding the actual strength of a crypto suite based on the underlying problem, the sized of the material and the computation strength needed to break it either via optimization and parallelism capabilities.<p>> The Web PKI deprecated 1024-bit RSA over a decade ago, and while I don’t know of anyone factoring a key of that size, it’s within the realm of possibility for a government or other organization with a large number of computers.<p>Is it? How do I verify such claim?<p>---<p>> Just a few days ago, someone factored the 862-bit RSA-260 key from the RSA factoring challenge.<p>Yeah, but how much time it required? and what about the resources? It is just a number, it is not all the 861 bits n numbers.
As you probably know, the computing time in the worst case scenario for brute forcing a cryptographic key generally doubles by each bit added. That is, it would take twice the effort to brute-force 129 bits compared 128 bits.<p>The security of RSA however depends on the factoring of very large numbers, and that means that for example, RSA-2048 doesn't translate into 2048 bits of security but 112 (roughly symmetric equivalent) bits based on the best factoring algorithms (for comparison, the RSA-512 the article mentions has an 56 bit equivalent and RSA-1024 has a 80 bit equivalent security, so RSA-1024 would take roughly 2^(80-56) ~= 17 million times to compute the worst-case scenario and RSA-2048 would take 2^(112-80) = 4.3 thousand million times more).<p>According to the Wikipedia article on RSA numbers, RSA-220 (66b) was factored in 2016, RSA-230 (69b) in 2018, RSA-240 (72b) in 2019 and RSA-260 (76b) this year, which is too close to RSA-1024 (80b) to be comfortable.<p>For RSA-250, the team reported it took "roughly 2,700 core-years, using Intel Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs at 2.1 GHz.". I am not going to (or feel qualified to) make estimates of how that would translate to RSA-1024, but it does sound plausible given enough resources.
This article from 2000 is about estimating what would be required to factor 1024 bit RSA:<p>A Cost-Based Security Analysis of Symmetric and Asymmetric Key Lengths <a href="https://cr.yp.to/bib/2000/silverman.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cr.yp.to/bib/2000/silverman.pdf</a><p>It was a response to the idea that 1024 bit RSA was under threat at the time.
> I am not a cryptography expert<p>> How do I verify such claim?<p>Step 1: Become a cryptography expert. ;)
> While I haven’t verified this LLM output is entirely trustworthy, it looks pretty plausible.<p>It's essential that you do, because generating <i>pretty plausible</i> outputs is an LLM's bread and butter. Otherwise, only the one that you actually tested should be expected to be correct.
I agree to some degree, but it's not essential for what I wanted to do (which is find a 512-bit RSA key).<p>The biggest thing I'm afraid of is that the generated scripts missed some entries, or otherwise mis-classified them, in particular whether it got the trust bits right for each root. I would put the chances of that having some errors relatively high.<p>But there's too many roots across too many browser installers, so I'm not going to confirm the Netscape UI matches what the extracted data says.
For a problem like this it doesn't matter. The part the LLM generated was a hurdle to clear on the way to the final result. Once the final result was achieved, you know the earlier step was valid enough to get there.
I think you're assuming that the output of the page is LLM generated and not the process to produce the page.
This is amazing news for people building hyper-compatible websites!
So this is why forward secrecy matters eh
This is so cool, I love reverse archeology of this, having another understanding of something functional but invisible from my childhood to finally understand it and then at a later now where we can break it. So cool!
<p><pre><code> openssl rsa -in private.key -text -noout
prime1:
00:f7:5b:73:5c:13:9b:7b:70:58:36:22:d6:25:e6:
44:15:f3:f7:b3:18:c5:11:65:77:f2:85:af:cc:79:
fa:d2:bd
prime2:
00:d4:81:b4:f5:af:a8:56:0e:a3:34:c0:e3:e8:60:
fb:b2:96:83:e2:af:6d:d7:09:3f:37:2a:bf:31:32:
cf:92:63</code></pre>
In the 90s, how long did people expect it would be until consumer computer hardware would be able to do this so quickly?
In Schneider's 1995 book he estimated factoring a 512-bit number would take roughly 30,000 MIPS-years (a one-million-instruction-per-second computer running for one year).<p>When a research team actually factored RSA-155 in August 1999, it took 8,400 MIPS-years due to efficiencies discovered. It still took 35 CPU-years spread across a cluster of 300 fast SGI/SUN workstations and Pentium II PCs (400-500 MIPS each), crunching in parallel for seven months. <a href="https://cs.ccsu.edu/~pelletie/local/risks/cryptography/Factoring-a-512-bit-number.html" rel="nofollow">https://cs.ccsu.edu/~pelletie/local/risks/cryptography/Facto...</a><p>Robert Silverman, a senior research scientist at RSA Laboratories, published an analysis projecting these new hardware requirements against Moore's Law. His expectation was that within 10 years (roughly 2009–2010), common desktop machines would possess the speed and memory necessary to handle a 512-bit factorization entirely on their own. <a href="https://cr.yp.to/bib/2000/silverman.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cr.yp.to/bib/2000/silverman.pdf</a>
From my recalling, a few years at most. There was, and apparently still exists, distributed.net which was aimed at brute forcing DES (easy), RC5-56 bits and then RC5-64 bits by establishing a web of personal computers (via a client one had to install). Thus it was well known brute forcing was achievable in a reasonable time.<p>PGP (1991) was considered secure as it was considered not brute forceable. With 128 bits, it was considered military grade at the time and the US had an export restriction due to that. That <i>might</i> have been an incentive for GNU Privacy Guard. In France you had to give your private key to the government authority if an encryption system used anymore than 56 bits (as I recall, I don't remember the exact number).
At least in the US in the 90s, crypto was effectively required to be breakable. There expectation was this was possible at that time.
It was also illegal to export software with cryptography in the early 90s, anything with keys bigger than 40 bits, so there was a lot of intentionally weak connections.
In 1999, factoring RSA-512 required roughly 292 CPU-years of work distributed across hundreds of academic machines, running for about 7 months. The community already knew it was weak -- the US export restrictions on 512-bit RSA were explicitly calibrated so the NSA could break it while casual adversaries couldn't.<p>Consumer hardware doing it in a couple of days in 2025 is roughly in line with Moore's Law extrapolations people were drawing at the time. The surprise isn't really the timeline. It's that someone did it as a weekend project rather than a nation-state effort.
I went down the same line of thought in the past! But I guess I was less thorough with my search, I never found any certs that small.
amusing the site is available over ipv6. I suppose ipv6 was around back then, at least.
How was it actually factored though? Where is the code for that? How was the private key created and how are the new certs issued?
> Assuming you’re somehow running Netscape 4.51 with a clock set before E-Certify roots expired on 2003-10-16, you can use these private keys to issue certificates. This describes zero people on the planet… except for this VM I set up.<p>The planet has a lot of people.
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lol nice job Marc Andreesen
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The cost per bit is a doubling in time. So factoring a 512 RSA, compared to a 1024 RSA is significantly cheaper. The OP used contemporary hardware to do this. so, we'd have to ask if the orders of magnitude improvement in tech (QC aside) would permit 1024 in tractable time. I tend to no, but I appreciate there are other points of view. And of course, the belief that one day we can apply Shor with success exists. At which point the question is moot. Not that Shor does not itself demand significantly more stable gates, per extra bit of RSA. I always wonder why people don't look at the trend line in stable QuBits and the trendline in cost of RSA. Do the lines intersect?<p>Remember, Shor is like a coded gate level algorithm expressed as sequences of interconnected stable QuBits. So, if you double the cost for each RSA bit you add, its not "nothing" in terms of how you wire the rig.<p>(not a cryptographer, or a QC person so I expect to be hit by a very cold but stable quantum clue-by-four shortly. Maybe they have to hit me 1 million times, to confirm I'm hit. Its statistics.)
It’s not quite a doubling per bit, which is why RSA keys are relatively large compared to similar-strength ECDSA keys, for example.<p>Steve Weis, who has been doing RSA factoring on some large GPU clusters, estimates factoring 1024-bit RSA would take about 2000 GPU-years, which is well within the range of anyone with a serious budget.
Yeah, 2000 years sounds like a lot till you do the math. Apparently astra was trained on 100k Blackwell gpu’s. So just over 7 days to crack 1028-bit rsa on that cluster…
out of curiosity, how long would 2048-bit RSA take to factor?
It's hard to extrapolate that far, but maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of years.<p>Naively looking at scaling factors is going to be tricky, because computation of this scale is going to involve things like "how do I hijack every GPU on the planet", or worrying about when the sun will run out of hydrogen if you're using a single CPU.
My article:<p>2048 Bit RSA and the Year 2030 <a href="https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:20482030" rel="nofollow">https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:20482030</a><p>We don't have any way to predict when and if 2048 bit RSA would be factorable at this time. We would need a breakthrough in hardware and/or algorithms. The common estimation that it is equivalent to the difficulty of brute forcing symmetrical 112 bit encryption seems to be based on some sort of straightforward extrapolation. It doesn't take into account the amount of memory required for the poorly reducible matrix reduction step in the currently known best algorithm. That's 10^18 bytes of memory, or a million terabytes, somehow coupled to enough processing power to actually make anything possible.<p>Even if you accept the 112 bit estimate, that works out to something like 400 thousand years using the Bitcoin network as a reference to what we could reasonably achieve.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size#Asymmetric_algorithm_key_lengths" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size#Asymmetric_algorithm_...</a><p>says approximately the same as a 112-bit symmetric key, so 1/65536 as fast as however your target platform does at AES128, but probably 2000 times slower again because RSA is a really slow algorithm.<p>128-bit security is the de-facto minimum standard. Anything less than that is suspect. That's a 3072-bit RSA key. We only ever tolerated shorter keys because RSA is so slow. You should switch to ed25519 if you can.
2048-bit RSA gives something like 28 more bits of security than 1024-bit RSA has, so it would take about 250 million times as long to factor one 2048-bit key.
Doubling per bit is for symmetric encryption, where no attack better than brute force is known. RSA can be attacked using much faster techniques than brute force.
Can you point at some papers or articles that talk about attacks specifically on RSA? I've done a search and have a few references, but I'd be interested to know if you have any particular examples in mind.<p>I know that factoring (which attacks RSA) is sub-exponential, and I know that implementations of RSA (bad choices of primes, timing attacks, etc) can have weaknesses ... I'm just interested as to whether you have something else in mind.<p>Thx.
I think you're looking for the large formula at the top here:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve</a><p>Reference to a scientific paper is given:
<a href="https://www.ams.org/notices/199612/pomerance.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ams.org/notices/199612/pomerance.pdf</a>
That's referring to attacking the factoring problem, which is one method of attacking RSA, and as I said is known to be faster than exponential, but it felt like the comment to which I was replying was talking about something other than just faster factoring.<p>I know there are other attacks on RSA, I was interested to know if the poster to whom I was replying knew of any others (other than factoring, which is kinda obvious). After all, I said:<p>> <i>I know that factoring (which attacks RSA) is sub-exponential, ...</i>
Check out the ROCA attack:<p>www.techtarget.com/cybersecurity/tip/The-ROCA-vulnerability-How-it-works-and-what-to-do-about-it%3famp=1<p>In practice it was confined to specific TPM modules, but in principle it shows how one flaw in the RNG can jeopardize the whole system.<p>I also remember seeing a similar vuln in certificates where an attacker _generated_ millions of certs and was able to somehow get the private cert by trying every possible seed for the RNG. (Like seeding every second from 2003-2011 for example, then generating a cert with it). I know I'm getting major parts of this wrong but it conveys the general idea.
Return of Coppersmith Attack is, as the name suggests, a really old attack whose fix has been known for a decades but was missed in certain newer implementations. It does indeed underscore how RSA is tricky and you shouldn't do it yourself. Everything has to go right for it to be secure, unlike something like AES which doesn't have such subtle failure modes.
Super ... thank you.
There are techniques to speed up the search for RSA keys quite significantly: they don't scale as with a pure brute force search, nor with a very useful rule of thumb (it's not even the case that doubling the RSA key length doubles its effective security, it's actually a fair bit less than that).