Google DeepMind announced on November 6 that AI agents working under human supervision found two weaknesses in legacy 1024-bit RSA encryption. DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli shared the work, which was led by Dj Dvijotham and Abhradeep Thakurta with cryptographers Nadia Heninger and Emmanuel Thomé. DeepMind says modern 2048-bit keys are not affected by either finding.

The first result concerns signature forgery. Once an attacker controls roughly half of the signed block, DeepMind says the padding adds no protection; in a sandbox test on an already-solved benchmark key, the agents reproduced the forgery with 3.5 times less CPU time. For a short 32-byte fingerprint, a new method is estimated at roughly 1,600 times faster than the previous best, though that figure is theoretical.

The second result is a batch-factoring algorithm that cuts the average cost of factoring each additional 1024-bit key by about 30 times compared with earlier batch methods. DeepMind says it has published technical papers on both results for the security community to check.

The practical exposure is narrow but real: 1024-bit RSA has been disallowed for new signatures since 2013, yet it still turns up in old devices and signed firmware. One independent check noted it could not locate DeepMind's primary text, so the headline numbers should be read as DeepMind-reported until the papers are widely reviewed.