On 19/10/11 02:42 AM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
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.
That's a manual not a benchmark. The benchmark is 2009.
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.
Well, I did say easy, not trivial ;) I'm not surprised journalists are
having trouble with the concept, but they could try asking their
children to have a go at this little quiz [0]:
RSA-512 1999
RSA-576 2003
RSA-640 2005
RSA-768 2009
RSA-896 ????
RSA-1024 ??? <<<==== FILL IN YOUR PREDICTION
Can also be done in pictures :) I think you may be over-complicating
things by searching for academic excellence where hard facts and rough
guesses will get the message across.
iang
[0] Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge
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