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IBM Retakes Fastest Supercomputer Title
dshaw858 writes "BBC News reports that IBM has unveiled its new Blue Gene/L machine. The Blue Gene project already has two of the top ten supercomputers in the world. Big news for IBM! I wonder what great things they can calculate in just seconds now... maybe I should get a stronger PGP key."
So no PGP key cracking. At least officially.
You really need something more than just a really fast/powerful computer to do PGP cracking. You're going to need something that can help you get your fingernails under the problem, because even this machine couldn't brute force PGP keys. There has been some papers written on theoretical weaknesses in RSA that, given a custom built machine, could be exploited. This is not a custom built RSA cracker. It may have enough raw power to make up for that of course, and that means you might manage 1024 bit RSA cracking if you are determined. Unfortunately any sane PGP/GPG users are using Diffie-Hellman/El-Gamal rather than RSA as their public key system, and for now there aren't any similar attacks for the discrete log problem as there are for factoring.
Your paranoia is misplaced. You should be worried that the NSA has come up with a serious break in RSA and Diffie-Hellman schemes that let them be cracked by a nice ordinary supercomputer, rather than worried about computer power overtaking key size. Most key sizes are chosen to have a fairly long lifespan even with massive increases in computing power. You aren't going to brute force 128bit symmetric systems any time soon, no matter how much computing power you stack up against it. No, the fear is in breaks to the encryption scheme.
Jedidiah.
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