The three-digit RSA is down

Our present through the lens of the future

The year is 2053. It’s 4th of July, the day the heartland celebrates and the coasts ignore. But this Independence Day is special. At 3:42 EST, the Pentagon’s three-digit RSA encryption (3dRSA) was broken. A nuclear attack followed, roughly three hours after the break-in; nobody claimed responsibility for either.

Unbeknownst to most of us, Jon Wang, 48, a head teller at the Belmont-MA branch of the Bank of America, BS in Mathematics from UMass Boston, class of 2027, had been working for years, in his spare time, on a particular extension of the Otto-Piers theory whose corollary predicts that a large group of integers—the so-called Kātyāyana sequence—render the 3dRSA vulnerable. Furthermore, a week prior to 7/4/2053, he realized that by sheer coincidence, the standard choices for the prime numbers used in the 3dRSA favor the Kātyāyana numbers. He tried to alert the military, but who would listen to an aging bank clerk?

What the Pentagon receptionist didn’t know was that in 2023, Jon Wang, 18, had a 1590 SAT (max. 1600), 800 for the mathematics portion of the SAT (max. 800), and a 4.65 high school GPA (max. 5.00). Another thing she didn’t know was that in 2022, Jon was rejected by MIT, CalTech, Princeton, Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon, and UC Berkeley because of, you know, holistic admissions.

Would our history have been different had we rejected the affirmative action before Jon Wang lost his hopes to join the CCES department at the MIT? We suggest re-reading The Man in a High Castle. Had we miscalculated the critical mass of uranium-235 in the 1940s—as others had—DC would be now¹ in ruins and swastikas.

1. In 2023.