<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;">On Mar 6, 2015, at 9:05 PM, Salz, Rich <<a href="mailto:rsalz@akamai.com">rsalz@akamai.com</a>> wrote:<br><div><blockquote type="cite"><div lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple" style="font-family: Courier; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><div class="WordSection1" style="page: WordSection1;"><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; color: rgb(31, 73, 125);">If FREAK shows 512K RSA can be factored in under half a day, then perhaps 1K RSA, which some have picked for the base year, can probably be factored in a week or two. So clearly, there has to be at least one change in your timelines.<o:p></o:p></span></div></div></div></blockquote>I'm not sure how you're getting your estimate for 1K RSA. The RSA-1024 factoring challenge - with a $100,000 prize - remains unsolved. Indications are that someone will break it "any time now", but it hasn't happened.</div><div><br></div><div>Of course, the initial break will likely be with a very large network of machines and a great deal of time. To get to routine factoring using reasonable resources will take a number of years more. NIST "deprecated" RSA-1024 as of 2011, but only "disallowed" it starting in 2014, which seems conservative and prudent.</div><div><br></div><div>Accepted asymmetric encryption algorithms have not be attacked successfully; they've only "timed out" in the sense that their security parameters have become too small to provide an adequate defense against ever-faster attackers. The "time out" periods have been predicted well in advance over quite a few years, so can reasonably be planned for. At least with RSA, trying to stay "way ahead" - say, using 16K keys - is impractical for performance reasons. What's needed for asymmetric algorithms appears to be: Pick an algorithm and provide a pre-planned means to increase key sizes over time.</div><div><br></div><div>At some point we might well want to "transition" from RSA to ECC. But there's little reason to have them as *alternatives*.</div><div><div> -- Jerry</div><div><br></div></div></body></html>