Q: Has a change taken place in factoring RSA keys?

[Jim Choate]

Hi,

One of the local Linux user groups had a talk at their meeting as well as
some extended discussion on the mailing list regarding RSA keys and
factoring.

In particular a claim was made that recent technology has come to light that
allows factoring of 1024 bit RSA keys at $1B (US)/day. The basic gist was that
they were claiming that 1024 keys were no longer reasonable outside of a life
time of approx. a year. That 2048 keys were by extension weaker, and that
larger keys should be the norm. There was some discussion about hacking GPG to
generate 8k keys.

I'm wondering if anyone might comment on this with regard to sources of info
or other efforts? In particular I'm interested in any leads regarding this
supposed hardware breakthrough.

I spent about an hour googling around and didn't really come up with
anything substantial.

Thanks.

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