At 11:35 AM +1000 8/16/10, Arash Partow wrote: >Paul Hoffman wrote: >>You are under the wrong impression, unless you are reading vastly different >>crypto literature than the rest of us are. RSA-1024 *might* be possible to >>break in public at some point in the next decade, and RSA-2048 is a few >>orders of magnitude harder than that. >> > >Just out of curiosity, assuming the optimal use of today's best of breed >factoring algorithms - will there be enough energy in our solar system to >factorize a 2048-bit RSA integer?
We have no idea. The methods used to factor number continue to slowly get better, and it has been quite a while since there was a single large improvement. That could mean that there are no more improvements to be made, or that some smart cryptographer who isn't focused on the SHA-3 competition is about to make another big improvement, or something in between. --Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com