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It's to do with "if we ever have big/good quantum computers, prime factorization is doable" and with "let's use the new shiny things". On a related note, someo
by staunton 2y ago
It's to do with "if we ever have big/good quantum computers, prime factorization is doable" and with "let's use the new shiny things".
On a related note, someone might discover some elliptic curve math tomorrow and your CPU can break all that stuff just as well...
- exe34 2y agoso with my cynic hat on, maybe a bunch of people already have that and that's why we're being moved off the hard stuff.
- staunton 2y agoThe NSA had the option to do something like that when they (via NIST) standardized DES. They chose to standardize a version that's secure against attacks that only they knew at the time, shorten the key length so they can still brute-force it if they really need to, and successfully kept the attack secret until researchers at a foreign university independently discovered it decades later.
- alphager 2y agoYup, that was the older generation. The newer generation used NIST to propagate a backdoored RNG and to weaken several ECC-curves.