[Cryptography] Fwd: freedom-to-tinker.com: How is NSA breaking so much crypto?

[Peter Gutmann]

Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> writes:

>Instead of wondering how long it'll be until it works with *longer* re-used
>primes, why aren't you asking why primes are getting reused??

For the same reason they're being reused everywhere in ECC: Complex to
generate correctly, and the known provenance of the published values.

(Well, in the case of the NIST primes the known provenance goes back to a
large spy agency with a history of putting backdoored crypto into standards,
but no-one seems too worried about that, or at least not worried enough to
stop using them).

Peter.