INTERESTING FACT OF THE DAY

In Oz they call bed linen 'manchester', and a duvet a doona.

Originally Posted by BluePete

Duvet enforce it?

So in an awful geaordie accent:

"I doo-na"

[NAPA121]

"I am not young enough to know everything."

-- Oscar Wilde (writer)

One for the techheads or anyone who ever buys anything online with a credit card. It refers to PGP, a particular encryption program, but which is derived from RSA, the encryption standard used for many transactions...

If all the PCs in the world, approx. 260 million, tried to break one single PGP encrypted message, it would take on average an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe to crack it!

Originally Posted by MeridiaNx

If all the PCs in the world, approx. 260 million, tried to break one single PGP encrypted message, it would take on average an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe to crack it!

You really believe that?

Anyway, before this post, there were no posts in this section of the site for 23 days. The same length of time that Britney Spears was sentenced to prison due to violating probation.

Originally Posted by Baph

You really believe that?

I'm not a mathematician, so I don't know. Read it in this, which seemed a very thorough, concise account of code-making and breaking. I follow Bill Bailey's view of being a 'relaxed empiricist': someone who'll only believe something when someone a little bit cleverer than them tells them that's what happened.

Anyway, I'm open to hear your explanation as to why it's not the case...

[Bluepete]

Peeling Jerusalem Artichokes makes your hands brown and sticky.

That is all.

Does anyone here wear Calvin Klein boxers?

Did you know that Calvin means 'little bald one'? Or that Klein means 'small or little'?

So when I see someone displaying 'Calvin Klein' on the waistband of their boxers (usually with their jeans low on their hips), I presume that they're hiding something tiny and bald in there.
Personally, if I was hung like a baby, I wouldn't wish to advertise the fact.

Originally Posted by MeridiaNx

I'm not a mathematician, so I don't know. Read it in this, which seemed a very thorough, concise account of code-making and breaking. I follow Bill Bailey's view of being a 'relaxed empiricist': someone who'll only believe something when someone a little bit cleverer than them tells them that's what happened.

Anyway, I'm open to hear your explanation as to why it's not the case...

I remember hearing stories relating to MD5 along similar lines (longer than a lifetime to crack the hashes). I know the guy who wrote an algorthim that can crack 10 MD5 hashes in 35mins. I (and a few others in my circle of friends at the time) helped design it in theory.

PGP uses a pretty well known mathematical process to generate it's keys. There are two methods to approach the problem. Brute force, or mathematically, like the MD5 cracking.

PGP reportedly, with a key length of 516 bits, and a computer that can process a million instructions a second, takes 30,000 years to crack. That's true. However, you can buy a home computer that can accomplish 18,938 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). So 30,000 divided by 18,938 is 1.415 years. That's on a standard home computer.

Now think about a supercomputer. The most powerful computer on the planet (as at Nov 2007) is capable of 596378 GFLOPS. 1 GFLOP is one billion (US term) floating point operations per second. Note though, that for a floating point operation, you have to do approx 10 instructions. Now do the math.

Then there's the mathematical side of things. Back to MD5, you don't have to get the password correct, so long as it generates the right hash. The same applies with PGP. Get the hash right, and you have the data, and it's always much faster than brute force.

12 people have walked on the moon!

Originally Posted by Baph

PGP reportedly, with a key length of 516 bits, and a computer that can process a million instructions a second, takes 30,000 years to crack. That's true. However, you can buy a home computer that can accomplish 18,938 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). So 30,000 divided by 18,938 is 1.415 years. That's on a standard home computer.

From what I read though, it suggested that as soon as computers could break the key within a reasonable timeframe, the simple solution was to increase the length of the key. What's to stop them doing 1024 or 2048 and so on?

Originally Posted by Baph

Then there's the mathematical side of things. Back to MD5, you don't have to get the password correct, so long as it generates the right hash. The same applies with PGP. Get the hash right, and you have the data, and it's always much faster than brute force.

Ah right, I see what you did there. I was only referring to/thinking of brute-forcing rather than finding another cunning way to do it.