Re: How to explain crypto?

Ben Holiday writes:

Im quoting directly from the PGP manual from pgp2.6.2:

"People who work in factoring research say that the workload to exhaust all the possible 128-bit keys in the IDEA cipher would roughly equal the factoring workload to crack a 3100-bit RSA key, which is quite a bit bigger than the 1024-bit RSA key size that most people use for high security applications..."

If we take phil at his word, I would say that comparing 90bit symetric to 1024bit RSA would be a bit generous to RSA.

It is very far from clear that Phil was right. As I said, these comparisons are all based on insufficient data. I don't think they are a great idea. Perry