On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Andrew McNabb wrote: > On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 11:32:26PM -0600, Phillip Hellewell wrote: > > That's weird. I was under the impression that 1024-bit RSA key was > > pretty good. > Jason Holt could explain in better detail, but the essense of it is > Moore's Law. 1024 bit was pretty good about 5 years ago, but computers > are just getting faster and faster. He was telling us (in class) about > specialized hardware that is really effective and doesn't cost nearly as > much as you would expect.
It's not Moore's law, it's the Weizmann Institute's improved factoring technique, called TWIRL (a follow-on to the earlier TWINKLE.) It's a specification for custom factoring hardware. Estimates put 1024-bit keys, and possibly even 2048-bit keys, well within the budgets of large TLAs: http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~tromer/ -J ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
