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About how many calculations does it take to crack a 1024 bit key? If someone has limitless time, money, etc., they can break it...but how many calculations does it take?
I did some calculations on this a few months ago, and it works out to be on the order of 4.42 10^29 steps. So then you can figure out how much real time it takes given machine speed. I also made some calculations for other sizes - to get the rest of the article gopher to chaos.bsu.edu and look at Misc/"Bits and Factoring Difficulty" where I have been archiving various cypherpunks posts, apparently flying the face of copyright laws blah blah blah blah. Since I wrote that I give permission for it to be at the gopher site ;)
Also, there is a password used to protect the keyrings. Assuming a strong password how many calculations does that take to break?
Well, if it's an 128 bit IDEA password, and brute force is the fastest way to "break" it, then 2^128 = 3.4 10^38. Karl Barrus klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLU7jtYOA7OpLWtYzAQFV8wQAjugItETGxmxMkXyGN798/9DwUnhpHU7g A7NskB3jBRSFvFJYwp1B/0c80v2I14LjZg1FHU2zlUD2NPza91mSRc0hW4WcY3Sq 2RQjZIUBxz9Fu+4XPEQWT7iFOh+MhGbx60h5QktXDaJaS46QrrsPz2SXaMbdG7iu BiyraoH3mu8= =aMtI -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----