From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 11:28:33 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: IBM's New Algo
In-Reply-To: <199705080041.TAA00687@manifold.algebra.com>
Message-ID: <yZ7c7D42w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home) writes:

> Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
> > John Young <jya@pipeline.com> writes:
> > >    The New York Times, May 7, 1997, p. D5.
> > >    I.B.M. Researchers Develop A New Encryption Formula
> > >    The system is based on a problem that has defied solution
> > >    by mathematicians for 150 years, I.B.M. said.
> >
> > I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago with a friend who has
> > a closed-form solution to a well-known problem that's been unsolved for
> > about that long.  He has no intention of publishing it, but he has already
> > made quite a bit of $$$ on it. :-)
> >
> > I've known the guy for a number of years and it's not the first time he get
> > a good result and makes money on it instead of yet another paper in a
> > refereed journal.  In general, lots more is known to some people than is
> > published. E.g. it's possible that some of stuff I did for my Ph.D. thesis
> > was done by the British crypto people but never made it to the open literat
> >
> > >    Mr. Schneier said that the cryptographic formulas now in
> > >    use were already robust enough. The biggest challenge, he
> > >    said, is creating security systems in the real world that
> > >    are not vulnerable to hackers.
> > >
> > >    "Cryptography is a lot more than math" he said.
> >
> > Let me get this straight - Schneier claims that factoring is secure now and
> > will remain secure in the future?
>
> Let me get this straight -- did your friend discover a closed form
> solution to the factoring problem?

Nope, the guy I had in mind solved something else which to me was about
as interesting.

But yes, I also heard via a grapevine that "a friend of a friend" claims to
have found a trick for factoring a product of 2 arbitrarily large primes
(hundreds of decimal digits) very quickly ("minutes on a PC"). I don't
believe in reputations in general, but his is such that this may be true.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps