[ILUG] Echelon exists..so says EU report

[kevin lyda]

On Sat, Sep 15, 2001 at 02:51:01AM +0100, John McCormac wrote:
> difficult to factor large numbers. If someone was to develop a faster
> factoring algorithm then RSA encryption could be vulnerable. Even with
> PGP, as far as I remember, the core encryption algorithm (that used to
> encrypt the data) is not RSA. RSA is used for the keyhandling. In some
> cases, who the encrypted e-mail is going to can be far more revealing
> than the contents.

that's not due to a weakness in rsa, but because public key encryption
is compute intensive.  and for pgp it allows for a size efficient way to
send multi-recipient email (which i always do - the recipient and myself).
you encrypt a key that is relatively small with one (or more) public keys
and then use that key to encrypt loads of data.  this is true for pgp,
ssh and ssl.  and if rsa is weak, then you can find the key and then
the message is broken.

this, btw, is why the public key crypto that sarah something-or-other
(? the caley-purser algorithm thingy) was hyped.  it was faster.
sadly it also had flaws.

kevin

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