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IP: more on Israelis Crack RSA 512 Bit in Microseconds
From: David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:24:14 -0400
Reply-To: <antoine () antoinebadel com> From: "Antoine Badel" <antoine () antoinebadel com> To: <farber () cis upenn edu> Dave, Don't know much about the truth of the matter -- but I remember reading this comment on Friday in ntk.net's newsletter: Okay, so it's easy to knock TIMES INTERFACE, but surely we can't have been the only ones who read their piece this week that claimed, almost in passing, that Israel's WEIZMANN INSTITUTE have built a "hand-held" quantum computing cracker that can break RSA-512 in less than a second. Woah. Let's just take a second to let that sink in. According to the Times' unquotable sources, that means strong crypto is a solved problem. Of course we're sceptical: sounds like the spooks have, in their excitement, heard about Shamir's TWINKLE prototype, got their photons tangled, and think they've found the holy grail: a quantum computing solution for *all* bit sizes. Perhaps the question is not, how the hell did this happen, but why are the spooks spreading this story now? Maybe they don't realise that the protection against TWINKLE is to just up the bit size a little bit? Antoine Badel The Wharton School MBA Candidate, 2000
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- IP: more on Israelis Crack RSA 512 Bit in Microseconds David Farber (Oct 03)