PC: Mathematical breakthrough could bring disaster for ecommerce

Academics report that one of the seven biggest mathematical puzzles may have been solved, providing a pattern to the seemingly random placement of prime numbers, which might throw a wrench into the mechanisms most websites provide for security. The good news for e-commerce firms and others is that no one yet claims the ability to understand the "solution" a French-born Purdue mathematician posted on the internet. [A quick skim of the document reveals a highly self-referential work that contains at least as much history and geneology as math, perhaps indicating a higher probability the document is the product of a crank, albeit a crank with tenure.] It may prove incorrect or, as likely, impractical to apply against encryption technologies.

E-commerce firms and secure services most often use a type of encryption that relies on prime numbers as the "keys" to encode and decode online transactions. The fact that huge numbers of combinations would be needed to attempt a "brute force" attack on an encryption system keeps many codes safe, because even today's computers cannot manage to try all numbers in a reasonable amount of time. Ferreting out a pattern to these numbers may significantly reduce the number of calculations needed to crack a code.