On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 01:55:53 GMT, Thomas Schoene wrote:
"R. Steve Walz" wrote in message


Nothing CAN magically guess extraordinarily long primes. That will
never just magically become possible. This intrinsic truth resides
in the very mathematics itself, a fact outside of time and progress,
and not in any technology of any kind.

That's true now, but only to a point. That point is the advent of quantum
computing, which allows you to effectively solve for all the possible
factors in very little time (say 10^500 times faster than conventional
computing for this sort of problem). If QC happens, large prime number
encryption is crackable in a matter of seconds.

Maybe. And maybe QC will make possible other encryption techniques.

OTOH, the real danger in the near- to mid-term is not crypto-system attack,
but physical compromise of the crypto-system (the adversary getting hold of
the both the mechanism and the keys themselves).

All good cryptosystems are still effective if the adversary knows
the algorithm.

The most effective attacks aren't usually on the systems, but on the
people -- e.g. getting an insider to divulge secrets.

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