Factoring Breakthrough?

An anonymous reader sent in: "In this post to the Cryptography Mailing List, someone who knows more about math than I do claimed "effectively all PGP RSA keys shorter than 2k bits are insecure, and the 2kbit keys are not nearly as secure as we thought they were." Apparently Dan Bernstein of qmail fame figured out how to factor integers faster on the same cost hardware. Should we be revoking our keys and creating larger ones? Is this "the biggest news in crypto in the last decade," as the original poster claims, or only ginger-scale big?"

Comments

Re:Really Unique Crypto

[arkanes]

The photos of the lamp are just a clever way of generating random keys (often the hard part of a crypto system), it has nothing to do with the crpyto algorithm itself.

Re:Were they even secure yesterday?

[JabberWokky]

Quite a few of us love the NSA and what they do. They watch the neighbors quite nicely, and don't generally poke around in our own closets. I'm sure that there's plenty of domestic intercept done in order to get the job done, but by and large, they ignore it. They are also the badass muthaf-ers of the math and computation community. Picture Samuel Jackson and Robert De Niro with slipsticks and mainframes. I am also absolutely sure that several people in their employ read Slashdot... not for some nefarious purpose, but simply because they're into Legos and Star Wars too.

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Evan "Geeks like us" E.