Brock, the crypto-challenged, humbly apologizes for his gaffe. He was looking for a way to draw an understandable comparison of how much harder a 1024-bit implementation of RSA is to break than what current export controls allow. He's asking for suggestions on how in future articles he could word this so a layman could understand it... Preferably something that could be said in a few sentences. (Brock cops to the fact that it does an incredible disservice to a complex topic. Remember, tho, he writes for a broad audience with a way diverse range of understanding -- or misunderstanding, as the case may be!) For example, someone sent me this explanation: "The 1024 bit key is likely an RSA key, and is not comperable to a 40 bit symetric key. From memory, 1024 bit RSA is about as hard to crack as 90 bit symetric." Is this a reasonable comparison? -Declan