-Caveat Lector-
On Tue, 31 Jul 2001 20:23:53 +0100, Andrew Hennessey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
posted article <005201c119f6$566b3400$d0e928c3@elessar>, which said:
> unfortunately this list is a bit of a playground for retired CIA etc who
> are trying to make a bit of pocketmoney - so the key wouldn't be safe
>
> also - I'm pretty sure the government/NSA has the ability to strip down
> PGP by now - its the first thing i would ask ET for - computer capacity
> like that.
Possibly so. Phil Zimmermann, of course, still claims that it would take
supercomputers several months to crack the code, but after I heard about
that new computer that was built to run atmospheric simulations, I'm
starting to wonder what actually defines a supercomputer. Compared to my
old TRS-80 Color Computer with 16k of RAM, this Athlon 1200 MHz with 256
megs of RAM is a supercomputer. Over in Europe, Sun Microsystems built a
computer with the RAM that equates to 11,000 CD-ROM's. Nearly 7 Terabytes
of RAM, that is. This computer is going to be used to try to figure out
exactly what happened in the process of evolution.
As for this atmospheric meteorlogical simulator, I don't remember how much
RAM it has -- I think they said 11 Terabytes, or they packed enough CPU's in
it to make it run at a clock speed of 11 Terahertz. I watch TechTV all the
time, so when I see the report again, I'll respond here and update the
thread.
Anyway, seems like with a computer that fast, it wouldn't take very long to
crack a PGP key. And I think all these new versions of PGP probaby have a
master key held by the government. I remember a few years back, the
government was SOOOO concerned about people encrypting the e-mail they were
probably reading left and right, so they came up with this plan to have all
PGP users private keys held in escrow and with a court order, the FBI and
other law enforcement agencies could use a warrant to obtain a copy of your
private key and decrypt your e-mails. Needless to say, privacy advocates
and PGP users were in an uproar.
Now notice that recently they relaxed the laws against exporting encryption
technologies outside the United States. Why? I imagine that not only do
they now have all our private keys, not even held in escrow, but sitting on
their hard drives so they can access our e-mail without probably cause, but
they also have a computer fast enough to crack PGP encryption keys in a
matter of minutes.
Phil Zimmermann says that we can always increase the encryption strength of
our keys, which is a lot easier and cheaper to do than building a more
powerful computer to crack it. But even in 1994 we had 2048-bit keys, and
maybe even earlier. Nowadays the most I've heard of is 4096-bit keys. In
1993 about the fastest consumer-grade PC you could buy was something like a
Pentium 60 and maybe a Pentium 75. Now you can get a Pentium IV running at
1800 MHz. We should be using at LEAST 131,072-bit keys to keep the same
relative strength of encryption that we had back then. But while computer
speeds have increased nearly 20-fold, our PGP keys are only twice as strong.
Yep... it's been cracked. Privacy is an illusion.
Damaeus
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