6 ms·
A 1024-bit break seems like the kind of thing Google would do to show off, like they have with a few other projects. Kind of surprised we haven't seen something
by bscphil 7y ago
A 1024-bit break seems like the kind of thing Google would do to show off, like they have with a few other projects. Kind of surprised we haven't seen something along those lines.
- schoen 7y agoThe cost-effective ways to do it might require making custom hardware from which Google couldn't derive any other benefit, and perhaps from which it wouldn't even derive very much insight that was useful to its business.
- AaronFriel 7y agoThe hyperscalers all have lots of idle compute, I'm not sure how many cores they have, but I believe the big three cloud services operate on the order of millions of servers, most of which have tens of cores now. If a 1024 bit key is proportionally more complex to solve, it seems they could solve it with idle compute. I don't think any of them would want the negative publicity that could arise.
- schoen 7y agoSurely it's at least a different power bill on modern hardware depending on what the hardware is computing, right?
- estomagordo 7y agoUnless I'm dumb, the 2.25 increased hardness from 768 bits to 795 bits would suggest a 2.25^(1/(795 - 768)) hardness increase per bit. That is roughly 1.0305. Taking 1.0305^(1024-795) yields something like a 970-fold increase.
- Dylan16807 7y agoA thousandfold increase is in the right range. But this factorization only took a thousand core years. Millions of servers averaging one donated core each can hit a thousand thousand core years in a few weeks.
- eru 7y agoGoogle doesn't have any truly idle compute. They can turn off their unused computing power to save on electricity. And they have internal tasks that they can throw arbitrary left over computing power at to get slight benefits. (Don't remember how much I am allowed to say about those. But it includes the kind of tasks you can come up with after brainstorming for about two minutes.) So breaking 1024-bit RSA would need to compete with those uses, not with true idling.
- mar77i 7y agoI take it as a... hmm, not a lie of omission, but more, like, an omission of "trust us"? Not really sure what words would be best suited to describe this.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoIt sounds line the kind of thing that would generate only negative publicity
- hannob 7y agoGoogle did such a thing with the SHA-1 collission. However RSA-1024 is still challenging even with a Google budget. Maybe they could do it, but likely it's still outside the "we'd do it just to proove a point" range. Also notably the SHA-1 thing was done in a time where SHA-1 was still widely used and Google engineers were part of discussions about SHA-1 deprecation. RSA-1024 is basically dead already.