This has been recently hashed over in sci.crypt. Here are a few generalities, read the articles in sci.crypt for the real numbers.

For those of us who don't have access to USENET, is there a mailing-list that echo's it's content and allows posting?

-If you did 1000 attempts to break a 1024 bit RSA key every second and started your calculations at the beginning of the universe, you would still have several trillion years to go. -If you stored every attempted key in a single atom, you would run out of atoms in the universe long before you ran out of keys.

Couldn't this argument also be made about a simple substitution code? How secure is PGP with current smarter attacks? Peter Baumbach baumbach@atmel.com