On 20 Jul 2015, at 23:19, Jonathan Schleifer <[email protected]> 
wrote:

> Am 21.07.2015 um 00:10 schrieb David Banes <[email protected]>:
> 
>> On 20 Jul 2015, at 23:07, Peter Kieser <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 2015-07-10 2:47 AM, Mathias Ertl wrote:
>>>> * Have a valid 4096 bit certificate with at least a sha256 signature.
>>> 
>>> 4096 bit seems a bit excessive. NIST is still recommending 2048 bit from 
>>> 2011 to 2030.
>>> 
>>> -Peter
>> 
>> I laughed....
> 
> He's actually right - the difference between 2048 and 4096 isn't that big. 
> 2048 equals a symmetric cipher of ~ 112 bits, while 4096 equals a symmetric 
> cipher of ~ 128 bits. If you think about it, it only makes sense: The bigger 
> the number gets, the fewer primes there are…
> 
> So, 4096 bit RSA just gives you an additional 16 bits for your AES, while 
> doubling the number of RSA bits more than doubles the computational overhead…
> 
> That's also the reason why there's no point in doing 8192 bit RSA: It wound 
> be insanely slow for just giving you a few extra bits. IIRC, to match 
> AES-256, you would need RSA-32768. Have fun calculating that! If you want to 
> match AES-256, you therefore need to go to 512-bit ECC (for ECC, you need 
> roughly double the bits than the symmetric cipher).
> 
> --
> Jonathan
> 

If you're serious about stopping someone with greater computational power than 
you getting at your data then you should take every bit you can. But I agree, 
most people won't bother because you'd need the computing power available to 
NIST to compute that.

David.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail

Reply via email to