Schneier on Bernstein factoring machine

[Matt Crawford]

> > Businesses today could 
> > reasonably be content with their 1024-bit keys, and military institutions 
> > and those paranoid enough to fear from them should have upgraded years ago.
> >
> > To me, the big news in Lucky Green's announcement is not that he believes 
> > that Bernstein's research is sufficiently worrisome as to warrant revoking 
> > his 1024-bit keys; it's that, in 2002, he still has 1024-bit keys to revoke.
> 
> Does anyone else notice the contradiction in these two paragraphs?
> First Bruce says that businesses can reasonably be content with 1024 bit
> keys, then he appears shocked that Lucky Green still has a 1024 bit key?
> Why is it so awful for Lucky to "still" have a key of this size, if 1024
> bit keys are good enough to be "reasonably content" about?

No contradiction at all.  "[M]ilitary institutions and those paranoid
enough to fear from them should have upgraded years ago."  Anyone
paranoid enough to think Bernstein's back-of-the-very-large-envelope
calculation makes a 1024-bit key insecure should have already been
concerned enough to think that SOMEthing would do so.

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