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

[bear]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2002, Lucky Green wrote:

>Philip,
>If we can at all fit it into the schedule, IFCA will attempt to offer a
>colloquium on this topic at FC. Based on the countless calls inquiring about
>this issue that I received just in the last few days, the customers of
>financial cryptography are quite concerned about the Bernstein paper, albeit
>the paper raises a number of open issues that still would need to be
>investigated before one should assert that the sky is falling.
>
>See you all at FC,
>
>--Lucky, IFCA President

Hmmm.  According to Bernstein,  It's better and worse than
it first appeared.  On the one hand, the "o(1)" term may
be quite large and cancel much of the speedup for keys of
practical size, and even with reduced costs, that's still
a lot of single-purpose hardware to build for a practical
keysize.  On the other hand, RSA is not the only system
affected.  The technique may work on Elliptic Curve systems
as well. Which of these sides is "better" and which "worse"
is something that you will have to work out depending on
your own perspective.

				Bear




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