CDR: Re: why should it be trusted?

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Tue Oct 17 10:43:23 PDT 2000


At 10:22 AM -0700 10/17/00, Kerry L. Bonin wrote:
>At 08:24 AM 10/17/00 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>
>  >That totals 14 orders of magnitude (and I think that's generous).
>>
>>So use keys that are six bytes longer than a "reasonable" opponent
>>could crack.  problem solved. 2048-bit RSA is still way out of
>>their league. 
>
>Unless their approach to factoring is radically different.  I've seen some
>extremely clever ideas leak into the non-classified press, like holographic
>systems for realtime off-aspect optical pattern matching for targeting
>systems.  Simple tricks that reduce the theoritical n-GFLOPS/MIPS of
>computing time to a few clocks.  Factoring is such a fundamental operation,
>I can't accept that the NFS is the optimal attack.

You still don't get it, do you?

A holographic system buys polynomial factors of improvement, not 
exponential factors. Shamir said as much, of course, with his optical 
tools he was writing about a few years back.

You keep referring to these "tricks" for reducing exptime to "a few clocks."

Paranoia is useful, but assuming that the NSA "must" have some 
selection of tricks which would astound and shake the world, absent 
any indications that this is so, is beyond paranoia and is into some 
weird kind of NSA-is-the-Great-Oz worship.


As Declan said, extraordinary claims require extraoridinary proof. 
All you've done so far is to hand wave (and somethingelse-wave) about 
how custom silicon and unspecified tricks _must_ be useful. As 
another poster noted, where's the 10^78-fold improvement?

(And the 10^200-fold improvement? Etc.)

--Tim May

-- 
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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