In the latest CRYPTO-GRAM, Bruce

In the latest CRYPTO-GRAM, Bruce Schneier weighs in on the factoring breakthrough covered recently on SlashDot. While reading all the SlashDot posts – that could best be summed up as “everyone update their PGP key sizes, quick!” – I knew I would have to wait until Schneier responded to make sense of the issue. While giving credit to Dan Bernstein’s work as good research, he says: “The improvements described in Bernstein’s paper are unlikely to produce the claimed speed improvements for practically useful numbers”. And: “it will be years before anyone knows exactly whether, and how, this work will affect the actual factoring of practical numbers.” Whew.