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FiftyTwo comments on Procedural knowledge gap: public key encryption - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (18)
Genuine question, what benefit is there to encrypting things in this way? Surely anyone really serious could decrypt it (security agencies etc) and you're already safe from non-specialists, so who is the protection aimed at?
Actually no. Unless the NSA has secret mathematical knowledge that a) they're not sharing and b) the worldwide mathematical community has otherwise failed to reproduce, no one can break the sort of bog-standard encryption your $200 laptop will do for you, without building a huge cluster of computers to manually try keys one by one. I think it's kind of cool that the math works out that way -- the world would be pretty different if it didn't.
ETA: and for each digit you add to your key, it will take them sixteen times longer to do this operation. And generating and using arbitrarily long keys is pretty much computationally trivial.
ETA 2: It was an honest question, don't think downvotes are called for.
Actually, yes.
Ah thank you. I was under the impression there were recognisable patterns from the programs, but I guess not enough to make it crackable. Thinking about it given the number of calculations a modern processor can make a second, plus the exponential nature of such things it shouldn't be that surprising.
However if various prominent pure mathematicians start disappearing in mysterious circumstances we may need to worry...