Vinge on PKE ?

[Lou Poppler]

On Sat, 4 Feb 1995, Jim Gillogly wrote:
> "A Fire Upon the Deep."  Our galaxy is divided into a number of zones where
> computation can be easier or harder than in the particular section where
/.../ 
> In this situation you can't trust your security to merely computationally
> difficult problems like factoring large numbers: the denizens of the faster
> zones could crack them faster than slower communicators could enumerate them.

Yes, and even in the here and now, we suspect the existence of Powers with 
computational resources far in excess of our own.  But do we know for 
sure that PKE *must* rely on computational obfuscation?  Is it 
demonstrable that access to a public key always yields the secret key, 
given sufficient computational power?  Or is this only a result of the 
clumsy way we construct our keypairs here in the slow zone?