From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Sun, 12 Feb 95 17:21:31 PST
To: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Factoring - State of the Art and Predictions
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9502121608.A20084-0100000@netcom10>
Message-ID: <9502130121.AA19540@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



"James A. Donald" says:
> So far no one has found a way of applying NP problems to
> Crypto.

Further than that, it has been shown that a large class of ways to
apply NP complete problems to crypto are insecure -- this being
generalizations of the break of the knapsack problem based
cryptosystems...

> Of course you can do discrete log on weird fields -- there
> is a lot of research in that which I do not understand at all.

Most of the eliptic curve stuff maps pretty straightforwardly into
the "normal" case and vice versa.

.pmm