[118586] in Cypherpunks
IP: more on Israelis Crack RSA 512 Bit in Microseconds
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Sun Oct 3 18:47:48 1999
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Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 18:14:19 -0400
To: dcsb@ai.mit.edu, cryptography@c2.net, cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 17:24:14 -0400
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From: David Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: IP: more on Israelis Crack RSA 512 Bit in Microseconds
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>Reply-To: <antoine@antoinebadel.com>
>From: "Antoine Badel" <antoine@antoinebadel.com>
>To: <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
>
>
>Dave,
>
>Don't know much about the truth of the matter -- but I remember reading this
>comment on Friday in ntk.net's newsletter:
>
> Okay, so it's easy to knock TIMES INTERFACE, but surely we
> can't have been the only ones who read their piece this week
> that claimed, almost in passing, that Israel's WEIZMANN
> INSTITUTE have built a "hand-held" quantum computing cracker
> that can break RSA-512 in less than a second. Woah. Let's
> just take a second to let that sink in. According to the
> Times' unquotable sources, that means strong crypto is a
> solved problem. Of course we're sceptical: sounds like the
> spooks have, in their excitement, heard about Shamir's
> TWINKLE prototype, got their photons tangled, and think
> they've found the holy grail: a quantum computing solution
> for *all* bit sizes. Perhaps the question is
> not, how the hell did this happen, but why are the spooks
> spreading this story now? Maybe they don't realise that the
> protection against TWINKLE is to just up the bit size a
> little bit?
>
>Antoine Badel
>The Wharton School
>MBA Candidate, 2000
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
