There is a growing debate in the cryptography community over whether the cryptographic keys used in dozens of applications should be considered compromised in light of a recent paper detailing a more efficient way of factoring large numbers. . . .
There is a growing debate in the cryptography community over whether the cryptographic keys used in dozens of applications should be considered compromised in light of a recent paper detailing a more efficient way of factoring large numbers. On one side are security and cryptography enthusiasts--professionals and amateurs alike--who believe that the technique, described in a paper published last fall by a University of Illinois-Chicago mathematician, could enable someone with enough time and money to build a machine capable of factoring keys as large as 1024 bits derived from the RSA algorithm in a relatively short amount of time. Such a breakthrough theoretically would jeopardize the security of common protocols and applications such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), IPSec, SSH and others, all of which are typically deployed with keys smaller than 1024 bits, these people contend.

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