On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, Deepak Jain wrote:
If its a big surprise that any key of any arbitrary length can be cracked in finite time and in finite resources, I think people haven't been thinking about the information presented in the security books out there. Most of the estimates that say anything is "unbreakable" don't recognize that Moore's law is real, and accelerating...
That is a falicy. Moore's law is most certainly not accelerating -- in fact: 1965-1990 Moore's law stated that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits (and therefore, the speed) doubles every 2 years. The pace has since slowed down a bit, but appears to be holding steady at doubling every 18 months (1995-present). http://www.physics.udel.edu/wwwusers/watson/scen103/intel.html However, this trend cannot continue forever. In 1997, Moore predicted we would reach the physical limits on transistor miniaturization somewhere around 2017. Whatever the actual date, we will need a break-through in computing to continue to obtain performance increases over time past this point. --Len.