* Alan Eliasen: > Florian Weimer wrote: >> To provide some more background, most of us probably worry about >> BigInteger performance in the 512 to 2048 bit range because that's the >> range used for RSA cryptography (assuming that Java uses the Chinese >> Reminder Theorem optimization for private key operations). > > I understand the importance of this range in cryptography, and I > especially understand the greater importance of the even smaller range > that actually makes up the bulk of CPU time spent in cryptography, down > in the 128-256 bit sizes. Most practical crypto schemes tend to use > those public-key algorithms with numbers of 512 to 4096 bits for the > initial key exchange, but then use something like 256-bit AES for > encrypting the actual data stream.
The symmetric algorithms relevant in practice (such as AES) don't do arithmetic on big integers. Your To: line was wildly wrong, I tried to correct that.
