On Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 10:39:45AM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: > At 02:18 AM 01/03/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: > >On Wednesday, January 1, 2003, at 08:55 PM, Michael Cardenas wrote: > >>People do break cyphers, by finding weaknesses in them. Are you saying > >>that you think that current cyphers are unbreakable? > > > >You know not whereof you speak. > > > >Breaking RSA or similar systems is very, very, very strongly > >believed to be related to, for example, factoring large numbers. > >Hill-climbing and landscape-learning algorithms are of no use. > > That's one of the main points of doing mathematical cryptography, > as opposed to the traditional "I can make a function too ugly for > you to figure out" approaches. You can make definite statements > about how hard it is to solve them, as opposed to vague statements > about how ugly and unbreakable your functions are. >
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, it's not yet proven whether or not factoring large numbers is hard. Until the reimann zeta function is solved, a solution may be found that shows that it is easy. -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred "Searching for the Truth through words and speech is like sticking your head in a bowl of glue." - Yuan Wu [demime 0.97c removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
