Folks: Regarding earlier discussion on these lists about "the difficulty of factoring" and "post-quantum cryptography" and so on, you might be interested in this note that I just posted to the tahoe-dev list:
"100-year digital signatures" http://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-June/004439.html Here is an excerpt: """ As David-Sarah [Hopwood] has pointed out, a Merkle Signature Scheme is at least as secure as *any* other digital signature scheme, even in the long-term—even if attackers have quantum computers and the knowledge of how to solve math problems that we don't know how to solve today. If you had some other digital signature scheme (even, for the sake of argument, a post-quantum digital signature scheme with some sort of beautiful reduction from some classic math problem), then you would probably start wanting to digitally sign messages larger than the few hundreds of bits that the digital signature algorithm natively handles. Therefore, you would end up hashing your messages with a secure hash function to generate "message representatives" short enough to sign. Therefore, your system will actually depend on both the security of the digital signature scheme *and* the security of a hash function. With a Merkle Signature Scheme you rely on just the security of a hash function, so there is one less thing that can go wrong. That's why a Merkle Signature Scheme is at least as secure as the best digital signature scheme that you can imagine. :-) """ In that note I go on to talk about more Tahoe-LAFS-specific engineering considerations and expose my ignorance about exactly what properties are required of the underlying secure hash functions. Regards, Zooko --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com