Cringely Gives KnowNow Some Unbelievable Free Press... (fwd)

[Bram Cohen]

Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:

> At 11:49 AM -0800 2/25/02, bear wrote:
> >...
> >The "secure forever" level of difficulty that we used to believe
> >we got from 2kbit keys in RSA is apparently a property of 6kbit
> >keys and higher, barring further highly-unexpected discoveries.
> 
> Highly-unexpected?   All of public key cryptography is build on 
> unproven mathematical assumptions. Why should this be the last 
> breakthrough? If you plot the curve of what key length was considered 
> long enough as a function of time, it doesn't look very good.

Indeed, the only PK primitive I *really* trust is secure hash based
signatures -

http://bitconjurer.org/CheapSignaturesBeta.py

Going one step below that, most of the practical breaks we've had have
been from protocol screwups rather than key length problems, and I've
never seen a list purporting to be definitive of all the gotchas in RSA,
so the only fancy math primitive I feel confident to design a protocol
with is diffie-hellman.

So there you have it - the only really confidence-inspiring piece of
public key cryptography was the first one ever invented.

-Bram Cohen

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
                                        -- John Maynard Keynes


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