WRONG. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, and do NOT moderate comments on the hypothesis they are relevant if you do not know for sure that they are.
The contest you're thinking of is a very different one than attacks on RSA -- it is probably the RC5-56 factoring challenge, which was tackled early in the life of distributed.net. The algorithms are very different; RSA is public-key, or asymmetric, cryptography, while RC5 (like DES) is a private-key, or symmetric, algorithm. These are very different families of algorithms.
Just as the algorithms are very different, key lengths simply can NOT be compared between the two. Most public-key cryptosystems rely on the difficulty of factoring large primes; private-key cryptosystems work on a variety of principles, but many current private-key cryptosystems are based on Feistel networks (for the curious, references in the literature are plentiful). In any case, private-key cryptosystems can generally use any integer as a key -- while a public-key system must select from a much sparser space (roughly, the set of primes; the integer n has approximately a 1 in n chance of being a prime).
RSA-512 has been attacked and solved before (see http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/factoring/rsa15 5.html). This being said, I suspect those who think this is a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of TWINKLE are right; I cannot see any breakthrough making 512-bit keys factorable in less than a week (even on big iron, like that mentioned in the URL above) -- and even if they were factorable in that time, most cryptologists have already said that 512 bit public keys should not be considered secure for transactions today.
If this is the software I think it is, I have some experience with it from 18 months or so ago. The speech synthesis being used there was monotone in the sense of a person speaking with little intonation, but of fairly good quality (the accuracy is, for what I worked with, more a function of the raw synthesis data than anything else). It's also modular, so that the synthesizer can be replaced with another one with minimal effort.
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WRONG. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, and do NOT moderate comments on the hypothesis they are relevant if you do not know for sure that they are.
5 5.html). This being said, I suspect those who think this is a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of TWINKLE are right; I cannot see any breakthrough making 512-bit keys factorable in less than a week (even on big iron, like that mentioned in the URL above) -- and even if they were factorable in that time, most cryptologists have already said that 512 bit public keys should not be considered secure for transactions today.
The contest you're thinking of is a very different one than attacks on RSA -- it is probably the RC5-56 factoring challenge, which was tackled early in the life of distributed.net. The algorithms are very different; RSA is public-key, or asymmetric, cryptography, while RC5 (like DES) is a private-key, or symmetric, algorithm. These are very different families of algorithms.
Just as the algorithms are very different, key lengths simply can NOT be compared between the two. Most public-key cryptosystems rely on the difficulty of factoring large primes; private-key cryptosystems work on a variety of principles, but many current private-key cryptosystems are based on Feistel networks (for the curious, references in the literature are plentiful). In any case, private-key cryptosystems can generally use any integer as a key -- while a public-key system must select from a much sparser space (roughly, the set of primes; the integer n has approximately a 1 in n chance of being a prime).
RSA-512 has been attacked and solved before (see http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/factoring/rsa1
If this is the software I think it is, I have some experience with it from 18 months or so ago. The speech synthesis being used there was monotone in the sense of a person speaking with little intonation, but of fairly good quality (the accuracy is, for what I worked with, more a function of the raw synthesis data than anything else). It's also modular, so that the synthesizer can be replaced with another one with minimal effort.