So it seems that Dan Bernstein (author of qmail, the mail server used at dsandler.org) has developed an exponential improvement in number-factoring circuits.
So it seems that Dan Bernstein (author
of qmail, the mail server used at
dsandler.org) has developed an
exponential improvement in number-factoring circuits. This has caused me
to go read up on related papers of
his, as well as differential
cryptanalysis (more links.
(Tidbit for those unfamiliar: When IBM was developing DES a while back, the
NSA stopped by and asked them to remove certain key possibilities from DES.
IBM complied, and for twenty years it was generally assumed that the NSA had
added a backdoor to DES — in other words, “please don’t use these
keys, because we can’t crack them; use these other keys instead, which we
can break at any time.” Twenty years later (early 1990s), a new kind
of cryptanalysis was discovered that is particularly potent on certain
regions of the DES keyspace — specifically those keys the NSA said to
avoid. So it turns out that (a) the NSA was strengthening DES by
disallowing use of keys that would be proven weak by later research … and
(b) that the NSA had differential cryptanalysis 20 years before anyone
else.)
Needless to say, this math is way beyond me. But it’s really
interesting.