I generally enjoy the content that Trail of Bits puts out, but the harsh tone and use of explatives seems only for the sake of attention to a non-issue. RSA, the algorithm, is generally safe for real-world use. It is possible to use RSA securely (we've been doing it). However, there is indeed an issue.
Lets define the issue: Poor understanding of cryptography leads to poor implementation in practice.
This issue applies to any crypto algorthim, not just RSA and ECC. If everyone dropped RSA tomorrow in favor of ECC, would all of our problems be solved? No.
How to solve this issue?
1. Increase understanding of general cryptography. It is a dense subject.
2. Make implementation of cryptography easier. This is slightly more difficult though, as it depends on your use-case.
The specific tone of this post is purposefully bombastic to call attention to the fact that RSA is uniquely difficult to implement and utilize correctly. Newer cryptographic constructs use various methods to reduce the probability of incorrect implementation and improve misuse resistance. Are they perfect? Of course not! But we're improving all the time with signature algorithms like ed25519, NMR constructions like SIV, etc.
I don’t think the problem is that RSA is harder to implement correctly than, say, Curve25519. The problem is that it’s much easier to implement almost correctly.
> 2. Make implementation of cryptography easier. This is slightly more difficult though, as it depends on your use-case.
No, this is actually much easier than increasing general understanding.
Just get the experts (which is a much smaller pool of individuals than the general populace) to commit to designing things like WireGuard instead of OpenVPN, sodium instead of OpenSSL, PASETO instead of JWT, etc.
Lets define the issue: Poor understanding of cryptography leads to poor implementation in practice.
This issue applies to any crypto algorthim, not just RSA and ECC. If everyone dropped RSA tomorrow in favor of ECC, would all of our problems be solved? No.
How to solve this issue?
1. Increase understanding of general cryptography. It is a dense subject.
2. Make implementation of cryptography easier. This is slightly more difficult though, as it depends on your use-case.