4 ms·

Math doesn't age. Cheers. bcrypt and scrypt, the successors to PKDF2, are both more than a decade old. RSA is half a century old and it's still up to date by

Math doesn't age. Cheers. bcrypt and scrypt, the successors to PKDF2, are both more than a decade old. RSA is half a century old and it's still up to date by modern standards. In fact nobody has came up with anything better. Edit: Actually, bcrypt might be as far as 1999, possibly older than PBKDF2.

goalieca 6y ago
> RSA is half a century old and it's still up to date by modern standards. In fact nobody has came up with anything better. RSA is currently a minefield of gotchas and few security companies even get it right. Just generating a good key is actually a very difficult task. It is also very computationally slow and has many practical issues for the level of security it provides. There are many superior replacements in both pqc and elliptic spaces. I would take EdDSA over rsa-pss any day of the week.
- user5994461 6y ago
  RSA is extremely simple, it's just multiplications and powers. It can be reasonably explained to high school students. The tooling is mature and keys are trivial to generate safely with a openssl command. EdDSA is another level entirely. I don't know how you can recommend elliptic curve cryptography with a straight face if you think RSA is hard. P.S. It's a myth that EdDSA is faster. This depends on operation (signing vs verification) and key size.
  - goalieca 6y ago
    Elliptic curves are also quite simple. Computing a public key boils down to point addition with a modulus. The private key is a byte string and the quality of it only depends on the random generator. It’s trivially fast to generate 32 bytes of decent quality random numbers these days. There are many insecure rsa generation methods with weak criteria. Too many are fossilized in libraries and crypto cores. Rsa also has half a dozen padding schemes and most are now considered weak or vulnerable. EC is generally considered much stronger for a much smaller key size.
- upofadown 6y ago
  Note that we are talking about a single RSA operation. So attacks that require repeated trials are not relevant here.

goalieca 6y ago

> RSA is half a century old and it's still up to date by modern standards. In fact nobody has came up with anything better. RSA is currently a minefield of gotchas and few security companies even get it right. Just generating a good key is actually a very difficult task. It is also very computationally slow and has many practical issues for the level of security it provides. There are many superior replacements in both pqc and elliptic spaces. I would take EdDSA over rsa-pss any day of the week.

user5994461 6y ago
RSA is extremely simple, it's just multiplications and powers. It can be reasonably explained to high school students. The tooling is mature and keys are trivial to generate safely with a openssl command. EdDSA is another level entirely. I don't know how you can recommend elliptic curve cryptography with a straight face if you think RSA is hard. P.S. It's a myth that EdDSA is faster. This depends on operation (signing vs verification) and key size.
- goalieca 6y ago
  Elliptic curves are also quite simple. Computing a public key boils down to point addition with a modulus. The private key is a byte string and the quality of it only depends on the random generator. It’s trivially fast to generate 32 bytes of decent quality random numbers these days. There are many insecure rsa generation methods with weak criteria. Too many are fossilized in libraries and crypto cores. Rsa also has half a dozen padding schemes and most are now considered weak or vulnerable. EC is generally considered much stronger for a much smaller key size.
upofadown 6y ago
Note that we are talking about a single RSA operation. So attacks that require repeated trials are not relevant here.