Series

How It Would Break

5 parts of 10

1. Part 1 The Fortress and the Afterthought: How AES Would Break at Its Key Schedule

   Jul 17, 2026 · 41 min read

   AES is not broken -- but if it ever were, the crack would start at its linear key schedule, not its celebrated round function. A structural cryptanalysis tour.

2. Part 2 How SHA-2 and SHA-3 Would Break: Merkle-Damgard Collisions, Length Extension, and the Sponge's Algebraic Frontier

   Jul 17, 2026 · 49 min read

   SHA-2 and SHA-3 have never broken, yet each construction already dictates how it would fall -- collisions, length extension, and the sponge algebraic frontier.

3. Part 3 How RSA Would Break: Why Factoring Is the Slow Path and Coppersmith Is the Fast One

   Jul 17, 2026 · 42 min read

   Everyone says you break RSA by factoring the modulus. That is the slowest path. A structural tour of the fast lane, the slow lane, and the quantum one.

4. Part 4 The Log Was Never the Weak Part: How Discrete-Log Cryptography Actually Breaks

   Jul 17, 2026 · 54 min read

   For a well-chosen group the discrete log is optimally hard. Every faster break exploits the group's structure, not the log -- only Shor survives a clean one.

5. Part 5 How Q-Day Breaks Everything: Shor's Algorithm and the Simultaneous Fall of RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and ECC

   Jul 18, 2026 · 50 min read

   RSA, Diffie-Hellman, DSA, and elliptic curves share one abelian period. A single quantum computer running Shor's algorithm reads it and breaks all four at once.

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