orolan wrote on Jun 3^rd, 2003 at 12:44am:

Anonymous, I beg to differ with you. The RSA 64-bit RC5 encryption algorithm was cracked on July 14th, 2002. While it took nearly fours years and the combined computing power of the equivalent of 46,000 2GHZ AMD Athlons, the fact is, it was done. And who knows how many algorithms have been cracked by the super-computers in the basement of the NSA building? Do you think they would actually tells us? Your cautions on the usage of PGP should be heeded by all. I for one would not use 64-bit encryption, or RSA for that matter. I prefer 128-bit Blowfish encryption.

No, RSA PKC has not been "cracked" though increasingly larger but still small key sizes have been broken by bruteforce keyspace searches. What is remarkable is the advance in pure hardware power and configurable hardware. Us techie types tend to fixate on key length and such but that isn't where the threat is. The threat, my friend, is from mundane things, typically money oriented. For example, I had some unknown person clone one of my credit cards (a cottage industry it seems) and a fake card (and probably ID) was generated. All these folks had to do was swipe the magnetic stripe and email the bitstream to their buds in Australia. The next day they hit up all the Jewelry stores in the QVC Mall.  BTW, they didn't even need a PIN to do that. This country badly needs ways to authenticate identity and I really don't understand why that is such an anathema.

As for the NSA, I don't much care whether they have cracked RSA or not. My guess is they they don't worry too much about it. There are far simpler ways for them to do their job.

-Marty