[13493] in Cypherpunks
Re: Patents on RSA will expire soon....
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Wed May 11 16:36:17 1994
To: fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 11 May 1994 15:45:52 EDT."
<9405111945.AA11431@smds.com>
Reply-To: perry@imsi.com
Date: Wed, 11 May 1994 16:28:24 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@snark.imsi.com>
FutureNerd Steve Witham says:
> If that rate of speedup held long term, and no significantly better
> factoring algorithms showed up, it would be 60 years until
> a 1024 bit number were as easy to factor as RSA129 was this year.
That cuts it rather close for some applications. Consider that a
constant factor of a few thousand is easy if a really good new
factoring algorithm shows up. If you are concerned that no one be able
to read your messages for the next twenty years, you have trouble.
Perry
