Larry Paul wrote:
> A mono... a mona....a poly... never mind
> I have heard that you can purchase commercially 4 kilobit encryption &
> thought to myself that that sounded like overkill. On the other hand Bill
> Gates himself said that "Nobody will ever need more than 640k of ram."
> Wouldn't 4 kb take a gazillion years to decrypt?
As usual, this is a misnomer. At our current level of technology (as far
as you know) it would take a gazillion years to brute force decrypt it.
However, since encryption is typically based on large primes and
factoring them together, if someone comes up with a new way of doing
that, or as Moore's law marches on, it gets easier. Of course, storage
isn't keeping up with Moore, so that does tend to slow things down a
bit, but then, that's what caching is for.
Keep in mind that ssh used to support a 56 bit single-DES encryption
scheme, which has actually been dropped (in favor of 3DES) from most ssh
implementations (including the "official" ssh, and OpenSSH/OpenSSL, but
not Cisco boxen and SecureCRT, which is what I use to admin my PIX) but
they decided that that was too weak and vulnerable (If you have some
nice hardware you can defeat it fairly rapidly) and actually stopped
supporting it. While I disagree with actions like this (IE, protecting
me from myself) it does underline the point that as time goes by, the
need for stronger and stronger encryption to keep up with advances in
technology becomes clear.
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