IP: more on Israelis Crack RSA 512 Bit in Microseconds

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Reply-To: <antoine () antoinebadel com>
> From: "Antoine Badel" <antoine () antoinebadel com>
> To: <farber () cis upenn edu>
>
>
> Dave,
>
> Don't know much about the truth of the matter -- but I remember reading this
> comment on Friday in ntk.net's newsletter:
>
>         Okay, so it's easy to knock TIMES INTERFACE, but surely we
>         can't have been the only ones who read their piece this week
>         that claimed, almost in passing, that Israel's WEIZMANN
>         INSTITUTE have built a "hand-held" quantum computing cracker
>         that can break RSA-512 in less than a second. Woah. Let's
>         just take a second to let that sink in. According to the
>         Times' unquotable sources, that means strong crypto is a
>         solved problem. Of course we're sceptical: sounds like the
>         spooks have, in their excitement, heard about Shamir's
>         TWINKLE prototype, got their photons tangled, and think
>         they've found the holy grail: a quantum computing solution
>         for *all* bit sizes. Perhaps the question is
>         not, how the hell did this happen, but why are the spooks
>         spreading this story now? Maybe they don't realise that the
>         protection against TWINKLE is to just up the bit size a
>         little bit?
>
> Antoine Badel
> The Wharton School
> MBA Candidate, 2000