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

Tue Mar 26 04:05:21 UTC 2002

On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, Deepak Jain wrote:

> If its a big surprise that any key of any arbitrary length can be cracked
in
> finite time and in finite resources, I think people haven't been thinking
> about the information presented in the security books out there. Most of
the
> estimates that say anything is "unbreakable" don't recognize that Moore's
> law is real, and accelerating...

That is a falicy. Moore's law is most certainly not accelerating -- in
fact:

1965-1990 Moore's law stated that the number of transistors per square
inch on integrated circuits (and therefore, the speed) doubles every 2
years. The pace has since slowed down a bit, but appears to be holding
steady at doubling every 18 months (1995-present).

http://www.physics.udel.edu/wwwusers/watson/scen103/intel.html

However, this trend cannot continue forever. In 1997, Moore predicted we
would reach the physical limits on transistor miniaturization somewhere
around 2017. Whatever the actual date, we will need a break-through in
computing to continue to obtain performance increases over time past this
point.

--------

If we are just limiting our analysis to computing power and their physical
size limitations, there are plenty of such breakthroughs on the horizon:

Like Molecular Transistors:

http://www.lucent.com/minds/transistor/molecular/

This is WAY off topic for NANOG. I'm done with this publicly.

Regards,

Deepak Jain
AiNET