Re: How to explain crypto?

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. On Tue, 4 Jun 1996, Declan McCullagh wrote:

"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