From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 01:00:55 +0800
To: Ben Holiday <ncognito@gate.net>
Subject: Re: How to explain crypto?
In-Reply-To: <Pine.A32.3.93.960604185950.36410A-100000@seminole.gate.net>
Message-ID: <199606051224.IAA11983@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Ben Holiday writes:
> Im quoting directly from the PGP manual from pgp2.6.2:
> 
> "People who work in factoring research say that the workload to
> exhaust all the possible 128-bit keys in the IDEA cipher would
> roughly equal the factoring workload to crack a 3100-bit RSA key,
> which is quite a bit bigger than the 1024-bit RSA key size that most
> people use for high security applications..."
> 
> If we take phil at his word, I would say that comparing 90bit symetric to
> 1024bit RSA would be a bit generous to RSA. 

It is very far from clear that Phil was right.

As I said, these comparisons are all based on insufficient data. I
don't think they are a great idea.

Perry