On Friday 31 May 2002 9:46 pm, you wrote: > On Fri, 31 May 2002, Alastair Scott wrote: > > -----pgpenvelope processed message > > > > On Friday 31 May 2002 8:36 pm, shane wrote: > > > i doubt that. it is simply a matter of raw math. > > > http://senderek.de/security/secret-key.protection.html > > > > Ah, but they don't use (general purpose) supercomputers. They use _very_ > > specialised computers; I read somewhere that the NSA has its own chip > > > > > > in short if they had a super computer than can only be imagined today > > > (not built) it would take hundreds of years to guess a key. > > > > Ah, but they don't use (general purpose) supercomputers. They use _very_ > > specialised computers; I read somewhere that the NSA has its own chip > > fabrication plant ... > > > > Your code cracker will likely be a PCI card inside a common-or-garden > > PC, not a black box performing the breaststroke in a lake of liquid > > nitrogen. (And the standard PC could be running Linux ;) > > > > And it may well use algorithms nobody in the 'free world' knows about. > > There's a known precedent: one of the most astonishing things I've read > > for ages is that the RSA algorithm was invented in secret about a > > decade before it was 'invented in public': > > > > http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/crypto_pr.html > > > > Alastair > > -- > > Alastair, > > that is some awesome information. thanks for the link. So, it was the > Brits who did it first? Yes, according to Simon Singh in his "The Code Book" pages 284 on -- public key cryptography was first formulated by Clifford Cocks, a young Cambridge graduate in 1973, that is four years before Rivest, Shamir and Adleman and their RSA asymmetric cipher. He was working at GCHQ (that is the British Government's Communications HQ ) at Cheltenham and I quote Cocks himself:- "... From start to finish, it took no more than half an hour. I was quite pleased with myself. I thought, "Ooh, that's nice. I've been given a problem and I've solved it." The book goes on to say that he did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. on P288, though, Singh goes on to say " By 1975, James Ellis (who had set Cocks the original problem after he and many others had wrestled with it for years), Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson had discovered all the fundamental aspects of public-key encryption, yet they all had to remain silent.........." Cocks was finally allowed to publish his work in 1997. Cocks is still around and was interviewed on TV fairly recently. Thought you might like to know. -- Alan Dunford, Derby, England [EMAIL PROTECTED] Coming to you from a Microsoft-free zone
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