On Wed, 30 Mar 1994, Jim choate wrote:
it. First, historicaly (and emotionaly on my part) I have a hard time taking the premise that the status quo will stay the status quo. I have this belief that some bright person is going to come along and blow all our pipe dreams away.
However faster cracking means faster encrypting (using larger keys) as well. I don't think the US government can maintain a tech edge over the market for long in any case. The Soviet government couldn't.
DCF
The point that is being missed is that if a method arrises to crack a n-bit key there is sufficient reason to believe that it can be used to crack a m-bit key, where m>n. I suspect that when the algorithm is worked out that it will NOT be bit length dependant. Also remember where most crypto folks get their funding from...Uncle Sam or his kin.