Weak Elliptic Curve Cryptography Brute-Forced

thegrommit writes "It seems one implementation of elliptic curve cryptography has been broken. It took four years to break a 109 bit key, but the contest sponsors (who provide encryption products for Cisco, Nortel and Palm among others) believe it's still impossible to break their 163 bit keys. The real question is, for how long?" Update: 11/07 01:59 GMT by T : Dan Kaminsky wrote to point out that the key here was really brute forced, and not broken -- that is, no fundamental flaw was discovered in the algorithm.

Comments

4 long years and the answer was ...

[burgburgburg]

Mrs. Peacock with a metal pipe in the kitchen

4 years?

[CySurflex]

4 years?? My bird broke all 104 keys on my keyboard in just one day when I mistakenly left the cage door open.

INSECURE?! LOL

[ltwally]

Relatively insecure? Forgive my ignorance, but didn't it take over 10,000 computers blasting away to defeat this thing?

Personally, I feel that if the CIA or NSA wishes to spend that kind of processing power just to break in my research paper notes, let them. Hell, I'll even donate my computers to the project to help them. ;)

219 is 109 more than 109?

[Kjella]

You wouldn't by any chance work for intel, do you? I mean 2+2 = 3.99999998673 is close enough ;)

Kjella