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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?"
don't tell me you haven't converted your judgments of magnitude to the ginger scale. everybody's doing it.
I use a 4096-bit GPG key. It may take a day to encrypt a message, but at least the encryption can't be broken (yet).
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... Oh, no. It's just an eyelash.
You could use rot-13 and your boss would probably be baffeled.
Especially if you misspell everything!
Isn't this just a creative variation on the one-time pad technique?
And all of these, really, are just techniques that split up the message, and then assume the decrypters can only get one part. So essentially you could do this with any encryption algorithm, just send part by the internet, and part by carrier pigeon, attack stoat, etc.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Is he going to pay someone $5000 if they can prove him wrong? (qmail joke)
No no, God is in the square root of the second time dimension. The proof is here.
It hurts when I pee.
.deen uoy noitpyrcne eht all is sihT
Crypto experts? Don't you realize the average slashdot poster is an expert on all technical and mathematical subjects, no matter how esoteric? Come on, get with the program...
From the government?
Forget encryption. Piss them off and they'll come after you directly.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I was always partial to the maryann scale, myself.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
And the symetric keys netscape uses don't depend on factoring primes ...
;
to be secure
Good, because here's a script I wrote that factors any prime number in constant time:
#/usr/local/bin/perl5 -w
print "Please enter a prime number";
chomp($prime = <STDIN>)
print "The factors of $prime are $prime and 1";
exit(0);
Of course, you really DO need to input a prime for it to work.
Solving factoring wins a Nobel Prize? Is that why it's called NP-complete?
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!