rsa broken summary.

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Thanks to Marc Samma and Perry E. Metzger for the information they
forwarded to me.

        Basically, it is not much of an issue.  The size of the key broken
(430 bits) is much smaller than your standard military-grade keysize in PGP
(1024 bits).  The math done on the RSA-129 message was very advanced; yet
it took over 5000 mips-years to do the sieve function alone.  A Gaussian
elimination on the final matrix took 45 hours on a 16k MasPar MP-1.  The
sieving was done by 600 volunteers; no one individual or company (note I
did not say agency) would be able to commit so many resources to one
project.
  
        A cursory look at a public keyring I have shows that almost all of
the people I know using PGP use 1024 bit keys, with only a few using 512
bit keys, and one using 384 bits (smaller than RSA-129).  The strength in a
1024-bit key lies in the fact that it becomes exponentially harder to
factor with size - doubling does not just double the time it would take to
factor; it increases it by a huge number (hey, I dropped Calc 3...)

That's my summary.  :)

If you reply, please don't reply to the whole list, just to me.  This list
isn't for crypto discussions.

cc

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