Scott Dier <dieman+tclug at ringworld.org> wrote: > > /me wonders if you know the exact plain text and the encrypted text, how > 'hard' is it to extract the secret key? By no means am I an expert on cryptography, but I'll say this. If it was easy, public key encryption would be useless, as people who share their public keys would essentially be waving around their secret key. This is certainly what happens when small keys (these days, <64 bits) are used. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA can crack this size key pretty easily (within hours or days). Most people, when using PGP or GPG, make keys of 1024 or 2048 bits. This is 2^960 (9.7e288) to 2^1984 (? - probably somewhere around 10^600) times harder to calculate. -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ Think. -- IBM / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20010923/437f2097/attachment.pgp