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
On Mon, 25 Mar 2002, Deepak Jain wrote: 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. -------- If we are just limiting our analysis to computing power and their physical size limitations, there are plenty of such breakthroughs on the horizon: Like Molecular Transistors: http://www.lucent.com/minds/transistor/molecular/ This is WAY off topic for NANOG. I'm done with this publicly. Regards, Deepak Jain AiNET