This just came to me over one of our internal mailing lists. It may be of interest. Peter Trei RSA Security ---------------------

A new technical note on Adi Shamir's "TWIRL" design for integer factorization has just been posted on the RSA Labs site, at http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/technotes/twirl.html.

Executive Summary: The popular 1024-bit key size for RSA keys is becoming the next horizon for researchers in integer factorization, as demonstrated by the innovative "TWIRL" design recently proposed by Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer. The design confirms that the traditional assumption that a 1024-bit RSA key provides comparable strength to an 80-bit symmetric key has been a reasonable one. Thus, if the 80-bit security level is appropriate for a given application, then TWIRL itself has no immediate effect. Many details remain to be worked out, however, and the cost estimates are inconclusive. TWIRL provides an opportunity for review of key sizes in practice; RSA Laboratories' revised recommendations are given in Table 1 below.

-- Burt

--------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com