3 ms·

I suspect (or wish, rather) that this is likely not what happened. I imagine this suit over at NSA, who probably started from a technical background. Couple of

I suspect (or wish, rather) that this is likely not what happened. I imagine this suit over at NSA, who probably started from a technical background. Couple of guys from a project team tell him they can break significant portions VPN connections, for $400M (because govt). All they need is to break a couple of primes. He thinks for a couple of days. He asks what happens if someone changes the primes. Silence. Someone says processing power will have made cracking further primes much easier in the future. "But the size of primes will have grown too," he says. "Not this time guys, maybe someday." This reminds me of a link I found here a couple of days ago. 1 Euro for 4096 bits of Prime. Mmmmm. http://www.mappamathics.com/ http://www.mappamathics.com/

mikeyouse 11y ago
Then the NSA suit realizes that changing a few primes would require massive bureaucratic organizations to coordinate and rewrite / upgrade software that's "in the wild" without a compelling financial incentive to do so and then he laughs maniacally. But seriously though, is there any doubt that the NSA would spend even 1/30th of their annual budget to intercept traffic that self-selects to be "more sensitive" than random internet noise. How much intel could you gather if you had 2/3 of the privileged conversations of companies, countries, and citizens who were explicitly trying to protect their communications? Even if the advantage only lasted a few years, it'd be an absolute gold mine. Not that it needs to be though, there isn't exactly a Board of Directors ensuring that the NSA investments meet certain returns. Cool link for the primes though, that's a pretty clever idea.
abraae 11y ago
Cool idea! But I (perhaps overly suspiciously) wonder if they would be tempted to mine just a few prime numbers, then sell them over and over. They state "For the standard ordering process, we don’t guarantee that the prime numbers are unique."

mikeyouse 11y ago

Then the NSA suit realizes that changing a few primes would require massive bureaucratic organizations to coordinate and rewrite / upgrade software that's "in the wild" without a compelling financial incentive to do so and then he laughs maniacally. But seriously though, is there any doubt that the NSA would spend even 1/30th of their annual budget to intercept traffic that self-selects to be "more sensitive" than random internet noise. How much intel could you gather if you had 2/3 of the privileged conversations of companies, countries, and citizens who were explicitly trying to protect their communications? Even if the advantage only lasted a few years, it'd be an absolute gold mine. Not that it needs to be though, there isn't exactly a Board of Directors ensuring that the NSA investments meet certain returns. Cool link for the primes though, that's a pretty clever idea.

abraae 11y ago

Cool idea! But I (perhaps overly suspiciously) wonder if they would be tempted to mine just a few prime numbers, then sell them over and over. They state "For the standard ordering process, we don’t guarantee that the prime numbers are unique."