17 Dec
2003
17 Dec
'03
11:17 p.m.
This touches on something I was thinking the other day: Most cryptosystems that we seem to use are based on the assumption that factoring large numbers is a Hard Problem. Isn't this putting all our eggs in one basket? Are there other Hard Problems crypto systems can be based on? In the ludicrous case, suppose Eve is visited by aliens and given a black box that would instantly factor a number irrelevant of its size... how much of current cryptography would this device invalidate? I'm no crypto-expert, so I don't know... but surely there are other hard problems in the universe that we can base crypto on... --Zachary