Significant Flaw in Public Key Cryptography

A group of American and European researchers have found a cryptographic keys flaw in the Public key cryptography. A system that is meant to secure online traffic.It requires the sender and the receiver of a message to each have a digital key to encrypt and decrypt it, respectively. One of these keys is kept private.
For this to work securely, the keys have to be generated totally at random.

However, the researchers found that some of the keys they found had duplicates. 4 percent of 6.6 million distinct X.509 certificates and PGP keys had duplicate RSA modules. It can allow the owner of one of the duplicates to hack into the messages of the other.Except in cases where people had the same key re-signed by a different certification authority.

Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research said:

"The problems observed represent security problems, and there really isn't any acceptable norm for security defects."