Thanks to all the people that chimed in on my question. I was trying to get an idea how they compared. It was (for me) even more confusing with the 25519 choices as I didn't know the size of those keys until someone explained them better.
On 5/11/2020 6:46 PM, Pete Stephenson via Gnupg-users wrote: > On Mon, May 11, 2020, at 5:15 PM, Mark wrote: >> I'm trying to understand the differences in strength between an RSA key >> and an elliptical one such ed25519 with cv25519. I know with RSA it is >> pretty easy to "gauge" the strength 1024 vs 2048 vs 4096. >> >> I could not really find anything to say how strong these elliptical keys >> are and how they compare to RSA ones. > Good question! Broadly, and with several assumptions, elliptic curves have > the same security level as symmetric (e.g., AES) keys that are half the > elliptic key's length. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size and the > references therein as a starting point. > > For example, a 256 bit elliptic curve key has a similar strength to a > symmetric key of 128 bits. > > Due to various reasons, not all ECC keys are powers of 2 in length. For > example, NIST P-521 is 521 bits long rather than 512 bits, and has equivalent > security to a 256 bit symmetric key. > > Cheers! > -Pete > _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
