[Cryptography] FREAK attack

[ianG]

On 7/03/2015 22:02 pm, Jason Richards wrote:
> Jerry Leichter:
>> On Mar 6, 2015, at 9:05 PM, Salz, Rich <rsalz at akamai.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>
> Is anybody actively working on this, other than TLAs? We know that many
> eyes make bugs shallow, and few eyes allow for implementation errors
> in crypto software. One or two organisations may be attempting to
> factor RSA-1024, but they may not be the sort of organisations to
> announce their success.


Nobody's been working on RSA factoring since 2010, when all the uni 
projects switched to mining Bitcoin ;-)



iang


ps; this is only semi-mirthful.  I have suggested that the PoW algorithm 
should be something that could be more usefully used by the rest of 
society, like house-heating, but that suggestion seems to be 
philosophically blocked by a misreading of economics that says that the 
material used for uniqueness (paper, hashing) should be of NO use to the 
rest of society otherwise Gresham's law kicks in.