On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 10:46:25AM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote: > In practice, any decent public key system will use large enough primes > that this is a "Got a supercomputer or a botnet and a good bit of time?" > case which makes brute-forcing an md5 password file look easy, but I > like to be complete and it is a conceivable avenue of attack, even > though it's thoroughly unfeasible to conduct unless/until there's a > major breakthrough in techniques for factoring very large numbers. (Or > maybe an advance in quantum computing. A lot of people seem to expect > that this sort of task will be easy for quantum processors, but I don't > know of it having ever been actually done.)
In Practical Cryptography (was that Shearing, or Shelling or somebody), he talks about the Chinese Toaster solution. The Chinese could put a chip in every toaster (or cell phone, whatever) they make with a subset of this massively-paralellized problem and when a solution is found, it tells the user that there is an error, phone this number and give them this error message and you will receive a replacment, improved, toaster (cell phone, whatever). The Chinese, then take each of the answers provided by the toasters and recombine them to get the complete answer. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
