On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 10:46:25AM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote:

> In practice, any decent public key system will use large enough primes
> that this is a "Got a supercomputer or a botnet and a good bit of time?"
> case which makes brute-forcing an md5 password file look easy, but I
> like to be complete and it is a conceivable avenue of attack, even
> though it's thoroughly unfeasible to conduct unless/until there's a
> major breakthrough in techniques for factoring very large numbers. (Or
> maybe an advance in quantum computing. A lot of people seem to expect
> that this sort of task will be easy for quantum processors, but I don't
> know of it having ever been actually done.)

In Practical Cryptography (was that Shearing, or Shelling or somebody),
he talks about the Chinese Toaster solution. The Chinese could put a
chip in every toaster (or cell phone, whatever) they make with a subset
of this massively-paralellized problem and when a solution is found, it
tells the user that there is an error, phone this number and give them
this error message and you will receive a replacment, improved, toaster
(cell phone, whatever). The Chinese, then take each of the answers
provided by the toasters and recombine them to get the complete answer.

Doug.


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