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[–] 4 points 7 hours ago (5 children)

I assume his private key ended up being mostly 4s?

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  • [–] 18 points 7 hours ago* (4 children)

    "Mostly", that's commendable optimism on your part. Not mostly but entirely. It's the entirety of the key: 4.

    https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/

    Edit: the source I wanted to link is down, probably server overwhelm. Ask the search engine of your choice for emudhra.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

    Wasn’t it a bunch of zeros followed by a 4?

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  • [–] 5 points 4 hours ago

    Yes... but no. You probably saw a rendering error.

    The private keys in question were only eight bits in length (decimal values 0 to 255). A proper key for the specific encryption should have been 384 bits, or about 116 decimal digits. If a string format function expects a 384 bit number, but only receives 8, it might fill out the missing places with zeroes.

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