Robert J. Hansen wrote:
Brian Smith wrote:
It is reasonable to choose to protect a secret for the rest of one's life
(~100 years).
You're committing two logical fallacies here: the first is you're begging
the question, and the second is the assumption of facts not in evidence.
Exactly what question am I begging? I think it is reasonable to assume that
people often have secrets that they want to take to their grave (at least).
Everything I have read suggests that RSA 8192 will be broken within (some
of) our lifetimes, so RSA 8192 or less is not enough. You basically said the
same thing in your message.
This discussion is about tradeoffs, and whether what is to be gained by
adopting very large keys would be worthwhile given the sacrifices which
would have to be made.
Modern computers can handle RSA 16,384 without too much difficulty, so it
isn't really impractical to use it. Even if it was impractical, there are
other algorithms (ignored by gnupg) that are more efficient to use. I don't
really see what sacrifices would have to be made, especially in terms of
implementing gnupg.
By saying "it's reasonable to choose to use extremely long keys", you're
skipping the entire debate and moving straight to the conclusion you want
to reach, leaving the original question unanswered. Namely: is it worth
it?
I didn't say it was reasonable to choose extremely long keys, although it
is. I said that if you want to keep a message encrypted for your entire
lifetime, you need to use something stronger than RSA 8192....
Saying "it's reasonable to choose to protect personal secrets for 100
years" is on faulty logical grounds because you _can't_ choose to protect
secrets for 100 years. You can't look that far into the future.
...because something stronger than RSA 8192 will probably take longer to
break than RSA 2048. Maybe RSA 16K isn't enough. But, anything less is
definitely not enough.
100 years from now the world will be unrecognizable to us. Scientific,
mathematical and technological advances we haven't even imagined yet will
be old-hat. The world of that future will be indistinguishable from
magic -- and I am at a loss for how anyone can defend against magic.
At what point should we quit trying then? Now?
- Brian
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