On 5/22/12 9:41 PM, Faramir wrote: > [F]actoring your public key to obtain a working copy of your secret > key is certainly something that may be done before the end of time, > and won't require dyson spheres to power the machine.
I'm not so optimistic. Factoring is a hard problem. We may never develop the technology to factor extremely large composites. Doing so would require either (a) the development of extremely large-scale quantum computing, (b) a mathematical proof of P=NP, or (c) classical computers that run close to the thermodynamic limits of the universe. There are no guarantees we will ever develop any of those three technologies. That said, no one has ever proven that the only way to break RSA is to factor large composites. That's wholly conjecture, and there's some evidence that it's not true. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
