[43181] in Cypherpunks
Re: Small keysizes do make sense (was PGP Comment weakens...)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Thu Nov 9 15:05:19 1995
To: Raph Levien <raph@cs.berkeley.edu>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 09 Nov 1995 09:25:39 PST."
<199511091725.JAA17620@kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Thu, 09 Nov 1995 14:51:02 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Raph Levien writes:
> > On the other hand, it costs nothing by most people's standards to use
> > a 1024 bit key, so why not use one? I find that there is only a point
> > in using low security for anything in particular when there is a
> > perceivable cost to it -- if the cost is typing a different number
> > while doing key generation, I don't see why one should suffer the
> > tradeoff.
>
> Perhaps it costs you "nothing," Perry, but not all of us have the
> massively parrallel 64-way interleaved banked memory nanosecond-latency
> box you have on your desk.
I've found that in practice the compression pass takes longer than the
RSA pass for PGP. If you accept the time for the file compression I
don't see how you can have trouble with the 1024 bit RSA operation.
Perry
