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Factoring Breakthrough?

Posted by michael on from the for-as-long-as-men-are-capable-of-evil dept.

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?"

2 of 489 comments (clear)

  1. No wonder NSA was okay with 128 bit encryption. by bigpat · · Score: 0, Troll

    I think that given that the NSA has allowed stronger encryption to be exported supports the idea that "they" have much more powerful algorithms than "they" have let on.

  2. +4??!? LEARN CRYPTO BASICS BEFORE MODDING by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Factoring 170-bit numbers is childs play. Anyone can do it.
    170-bit symmetric crypto would be a whole different matter.