How to explain crypto?
Brock, the crypto-challenged, humbly apologizes for his gaffe. He was looking for a way to draw an understandable comparison of how much harder a 1024-bit implementation of RSA is to break than what current export controls allow. He's asking for suggestions on how in future articles he could word this so a layman could understand it... Preferably something that could be said in a few sentences. (Brock cops to the fact that it does an incredible disservice to a complex topic. Remember, tho, he writes for a broad audience with a way diverse range of understanding -- or misunderstanding, as the case may be!) For example, someone sent me this explanation: "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
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
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
participants (3)
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Ben Holiday -
declan＠well.com -
Perry E. Metzger