A Mighty Number Falls

space_in_your_face writes "An international team has broken a long-standing record in an impressive feat of calculation. On March 6, computer clusters from three institutions (the EPFL, the University of Bonn, and NTT in Japan) reached the end of eleven months of strenuous calculation, churning out the prime factors of a well-known, hard-to-factor number — 2^1039 - 1 — that is 307 digits long." The lead researcher believes "the writing is on the wall" for 1024-bit encryption. "Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to a non-special hard-to factor number (155 digits). I won't make predictions, but let's just say it might be a good idea to stay tuned."

Comments

Re:How long is long-enough?

[DerekLyons]

Can any security researchers tell me what GPG key length I should be using in the real world to give me a good trade-off between computational simplicity and future security please? I'm only using crypto for email and secure file storage.

In reality? You probably don't need any crypto at all. Or, in other words; What are you trying to hide that needs to be hidden forever? (Maybe you shouldn't be doing it.) Or are you one of those folks who feels he needs encryption just to get street cred among his fellow geeks - and the larger the key the larger your E-penis is?