Patents on RSA will expire soon....

Perry E. Metzger perry at snark.imsi.com
Wed May 11 13:28:36 PDT 1994



FutureNerd Steve Witham says:
> If that rate of speedup held long term, and no significantly better
> factoring algorithms showed up, it would be 60 years until
> a 1024 bit number were as easy to factor as RSA129 was this year.

That cuts it rather close for some applications. Consider that a
constant factor of a few thousand is easy if a really good new
factoring algorithm shows up. If you are concerned that no one be able
to read your messages for the next twenty years, you have trouble.

Perry






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