From: sevmek@yabbs
To: rattler@yabbs
Subject: re: rsa
Date: Mon May  2 14:43:08 1994
In message re: rsa, rattler said:
> we... when they factored rsa129 they didn't have a super connection 
> machine
> to do it with.
> 
> i fugure 500 megabytes of ram and 64000 cpus oughta speed things up
> a bit.
> 

Yes, it might speed things up a bit.  But not nearly as much as you may think.
The bottleneck becomes dealing with all the processors and what each should
be doing.  Also, rsa129 was ONE two-prime composite.  It happened to be the
one Scientific American chose to base their contest on.  In just the 129
digit realm there are MANY others... let's say that one out of every trillion
numbers is a suitable prime.  That leaves 10^117 choices for a 129 digit key.
Each of which would take all those little computers ANOTHER 8 months, or the 
NSA perhaps several days.

I think the 'weak link' in RSA is how you handle the passwords in real life,
remember what they are, and where and how you handle the decoded information.
The number of processors you throw at a problem doesn't change the problem's
order of magnitude.

--Sevmek