On 20/08/10 04:18, Jonathan Leybovich wrote: > Plus I would wager that asymmetric ciphers will stand up to attacks far > longer than most hashing functions.
In a past life, I was a PhD student working on a broad military-funded project which aimed to break all known asymmetric cryptography schemes using large, expensive machines known as quantum computers. There will come a point, maybe even this century, when large-block symmetric ciphers like the WHIRLPOOL compression function will be the only sort of security we will have left, unless you don't mind the government being able to read all your messages. Asymmetric ciphers are the only kind of widely-used cipher that have a known vulnerability which allows cryptanalysis exponentially faster than brute force, i.e. in polynomial time and space with respect to the key length. So I think your faith is misplaced. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
