Researchers warn that many 1024-bit keys used to secure communications on the internet might be based on prime numbers that have been intentionally backdoored in an undetectable way. Key-generation algorithms rely on prime parameters whose generation is supposed to be verifiably random. Many parameters have been standardized and are being used in popular crypto algorithms like Diffie-Hellman and DSA without the seeds that were used to generate them ever being published. This makes it impossible to tell whether, for example, the primes were intentionally “backdoored””]