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

[Werner Koch]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 05:08:28 -0600 (CST), Jim Choate said:

> 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

Adi Shamir's TWINKLE, I guess.

> 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.

That won't help unless you find a way to get random number as good as
the keysize.  The hack itself is trivial but I don't do it because
large keys are a headache for low-end machines and they trick users
into false security assumptions.  I am pretty sure that any PC or
usage of GnuPG can be broken by spending far less money.

  Werner

-- 
Werner Koch                                      <wk at gnupg.org>
The GnuPG Experts                                http://g10code.com
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 http://fsfeurope.org