From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@snark.imsi.com>
Date: Wed, 11 May 94 13:28:36 PDT
To: fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)
Subject: Re: Patents on RSA will expire soon....
In-Reply-To: <9405111945.AA11431@smds.com>
Message-ID: <9405112028.AA13574@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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