From: Karl Lui Barrus <klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu>
Date: Tue, 1 Feb 94 15:25:29 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: PGP
Message-ID: <9402012321.AA07980@wahoo.owlnet.rice.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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>About how many calculations does it take to crack a 1024 bit key?  If
>someone has limitless time, money, etc., they can break it...but how
>many calculations does it take?

I did some calculations on this a few months ago, and it works out to
be on the order of 4.42 10^29 steps.  So then you can figure out how
much real time it takes given machine speed.

I also made some calculations for other sizes - to get the rest of the
article gopher to chaos.bsu.edu and look at Misc/"Bits and Factoring
Difficulty" where I have been archiving various cypherpunks posts,
apparently flying the face of copyright laws blah blah blah blah.

Since I wrote that I give permission for it to be at the gopher site
;)

>Also, there is a password used to protect the keyrings.  Assuming a
>strong password how many calculations does that take to break?

Well, if it's an 128 bit IDEA password, and brute force is the fastest
way to "break" it, then 2^128 = 3.4 10^38.

Karl Barrus
klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu


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