2048-bit RSA keys

[Paul Hoffman]

At 11:35 AM +1000 8/16/10, Arash Partow wrote:
>Paul Hoffman wrote:
>>You are under the wrong impression, unless you are reading vastly different crypto literature than the rest of us are. RSA-1024 *might* be possible to break in public at some point in the next decade, and RSA-2048 is a few orders of magnitude harder than that.
>>
>
>Just out of curiosity, assuming the optimal use of today's best of breed factoring algorithms - will there be enough energy in our solar system to factorize a 2048-bit RSA integer?

We have no idea. The methods used to factor number continue to slowly get better, and it has been quite a while since there was a single large improvement. That could mean that there are no more improvements to be made, or that some smart cryptographer who isn't focused on the SHA-3 competition is about to make another big improvement, or something in between.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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