TWIRL: Are 1024-bit RSA Keys Unsafe?

This came across the Interesting-People list today: a preliminary draft of a paper, co-authored by Adi Shamir, that proposes new hardware for factoring large numbers. It is claimed that a machine could be built which would be "3-4 orders of magnitude more cost effective than the best previously published designs," and that "the NFS sieving step for 1024-bit RSA keys can be completed in less than a year by a $10M device." For background, here's a primer on key length in symmetric and asymmetric crypto.

Comments

CIA's and NSA's next purchase

[linuxislandsucks]

You do realize that this is CIA's and NSA's next purchase don't you? Of course this also means that the World outside the United States will choose Linux on a faster scale than ever beofre..because they tend to link Microsoft with these trends..:)

Brute force

[beefguts]

Someone once calculated the amount of heats created by switching a bit on or off and then calculated how much heat would be generated by a brute force approach to cracking a 1024 bit encryption key. This worked out to be about the same amount of energy as the sun puts out in one day. I'm not claiming that is entirely accurate but it makes me wonder.