Google DeepMind’s AI agents expose two weaknesses in legacy 1024-bit RSA

Human-guided AI research found a signature forgery flaw and a cheaper batch factoring method, while 2048-bit keys remain safe Google DeepMind says its AI models, working under human direction, have found two weaknesses in legacy 1024-bit RSA encryption. The company announced the findings on November 6, 2026. The headline caveat comes early: modern RSA deployments using 2048-bit or larger keys remain secure against this specific threat. The research targets the older, shorter keys, not the current standard. What DeepMind actually found The research identified two distinct vulnerabilities in 1024-bit RSA systems. Both point the same way: attacking these systems may take far less computing effort than cryptographers had previously assumed. The first weakness enables the forgery of digital signatures. Digital signatures work like a wax seal on a letter, proving who sent it and that nobody tampered with it along the way. The second finding is a new algorithm that lowers the cost of batch factoring for related moduli. RSA security rests on a simple bet: multiplying two huge prime numbers is easy, but working backward from the product to find those primes is brutally hard. The product is ...