On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 10:24:36AM +0200, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
Most reasonable explanation yet. More reasonable than a secret large-enough quantum computer. But I continue to suspect they have one more well hidden. This has the level of "secret that people that "know a lot" know". It kind of satisfies our need to know about secret stuff the government does. The actually secret stuff, well, don't you wish we knew.
You obviously have to consider not just the known unknowns, but also unknown unknowns. FWIW, I much doubt they can factor large numbers with QC (if you want to make sure, do a lit review on QC, pull up the list of names, and see whether some of them suddenly stopped publishing, or greatly reduced their publishing rate), but public key cryptosystems do have a slight smell about them lately. We definitely need more diversity in cryptosystems, and should revert to systems which are more well-understood, and focus on future systems that are simple to analyze.