On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 13:21:10 +0100, Airey, John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This gives you two options. One, use brute force to break the SSL encryption. Two > (and it's entirely possible that the security services have this already) come up > with a mathematical way to factor large primes rapidly.
I think you may mean something slightly differently; given any large prime p, I can factor it completely extremely quickly: p = 1 * p There are no other factors; this *is* the prime factorization. :) Bill Gates made the same mistake in his book _The Road Ahead_. Factoring large primes is trivial; the prime factorization of large numbers is hard, and I guess that's what you meant. And if the problem of factoring large numbers into primes was indeed solved (this is probably what you meant), I think you'd very quickly see a complete replacement of crypto systems in use today by the governments with such security services. -- Kyle Maxwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
