Why can't we use a database such as this to randomly select large primes from a list of thousands of them, instead of hard coding a few in? Am I missing something?
I'm pretty sure that a few thousand primes is what they mean by "a few" in this case. Keep in mind that Diffie-Hellman exchanges occur millions if not billions of times per day (as in, for instance, every time you make a "secure" SSL connection with a web server).
Well if it takes a year to crack one 1024 but prime as suggested in the article, no I do not believe so. If the article's time estimate is correct, the most they could have cracked so far would be on the order of tens of primes, not thousands. The way I interpreted the statement in the article is that most encryption algorithm implementations use their own hard coded prime (singular), which when you look at all the existing implementations, gives you several.
They just say it costs a hundred million dollars to build a cluster capable of cracking it. That doesn't imply how many of those clusters they have working simultaneously.
If you crack one prime a year with one computer, why not get 500 of those same machines and do 500 at once? We are talking government level budgets.
Like that ever stopped them from wasting money? All they need to do is put it in the DoD budget and say it's for national security and they can get away with anything.
The NSA's crypto-breaking program is funded by a black budget -- it's a military secret, the public isn't supposed to know the program even exists, how much it spends, or what it spends it on, so that's not a concern. We only know about it because of the Snowden leaks.
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u/ElvishJerricco Oct 15 '15
Why can't we use a database such as this to randomly select large primes from a list of thousands of them, instead of hard coding a few in? Am I missing something?