On Oct 18, 2011, at 8:24 AM, ianG wrote: > On 19/10/11 01:51 AM, Paul Hoffman wrote: >> On Oct 18, 2011, at 4:10 AM, ianG wrote: >> >>> Another meta question: I seem to have missed the news that RSA has stopped >>> their factoring challenge in 2007! >>> >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge >>> >>> Has anything replaced it? This is a great loss, what on earth where RSA >>> thinking? >> >> Can you say more why it is a "great loss"? > > Well, it gave us a reliable benchmark.
We still have that. When someone wants to break RSA 768 in a way that will be useful to the crypto community, they'll know exactly how to do it. > It's also a very strong message, an easy to understand event. Cracking the > code was easy for the media to grasp. There are very few such easy to > explain events. In comparison, if you look at all the other crypto news, > it's very hard to get a grasp of what it means .. to laymen. We strongly disagree here. Few, if any, media reports of the previous factorings did a reasonable job of explaining what breaking a key of ~700 bits meant to users of 1024 bit keys, much less of 2048 bit keys. --Paul Hoffman _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
