1024-bit RSA keys in danger of compromise (fwd)

Tue Mar 26 00:12:58 UTC 2002

Len Sassaman <rabbi at quickie.net> writes:

> Prior to Bernstein's discovery the row-reduction step in
factorization
> could be made massively parallelizable, we believed that 1024 bit
keys
> would remain unfactorable essentially forever. Now, 1024 bit RSA
keys look
> to be factorable either presently, or in the very near future once
Moore's
> law is taken into account. However, at a price tag of $2 billion for
a
> specialized machine, we have a few years before anyone outside of
the
> intelligence community attempts this.
>
> What is most concerning to me is a few discoveries that were made
while
> looking into the problem of widespread use of 1024 bit keys:

Out of curiosity, was there any indication that Bernstein's
improvements might apply to the discrete log problem, DSA in general,
and the 1024-bit limit on key size built into NIST's DSS standard?
Revoking an RSA key and re-issuing a longer one might be a pain, but
there's no option for that in the current GPG implementation.

Cheers.

-travis