Rob Landley <landley@trommello.org> writes:
> Not that it's worth it. Keys get exponentially more difficult to
> brute force as the key length increases. I read part of a book a
> long time ago (might have been called "applied cryptography") that
> figured out that if you could build a perfectly efficient computer
> that could do 1 bit's worth of calculation with the the amount of
> energy in the minimal electron state transition in a hydrogen atom,
> and you built a dyson sphere around the sun to capture its entire
> energy output for the however many billion years its expected to
> last, you wouldn't even brute-force exhaust a relatively small
> keyspace (128 bits? 256 bits? Something like that).
>
> Somebody else here is likely to recognize the above anecdote and give a more
> accurate reference. Book title and page number would be good...
Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" (second edition, may be in the
first edition as well), pages 157-158 ("Thermodynamic Limitations").
-- Hilsen Harald. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 15 2002 - 21:01:00 EST