Hardly anyone is interested in my tax return—there’s not much to it. And that’s a good thing, given that an attacker might have fairly easily intercepted the encrypted communication between my laptop and printer when I printed the return in recent years.
In early 2022 information technology security researcher Hanno Böck discovered that some of these encryptions could be cracked in a process that he went on to describe in a 2023 preprint paperposted to the International Association for Cryptologic Research’s Cryptology ePrint Archive. His method can be traced back to one developed by the French scholar Pierre de Fermat in the 17th century.
Fermat—most famous for his mysterious “last theorem,” which vexed experts for decades—contributed all kinds of useful things to the world of science in his lifetime. For example, he laid the foundations for the theory of probability and also worked a lot on prime numbers—those values that are only divisible by 1 and themselves.
Mathematicians suspected they could use Fermat’s work to break encryption—and Böck demonstrated that case.
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