Subject: Re: Long RSA keys
To: Karsten W. Rohrbach <karsten@rohrbach.de>
From: Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>
List: tech-security
Date: 08/30/2002 10:16:28
"Karsten W. Rohrbach" <karsten@rohrbach.de> writes:
> Perry E. Metzger(perry@piermont.com)@2002.08.29 16:03:03 +0000:
> [...]
> > If you think that you have something new and exciting to tell me that
> > I've never heard of before, check if it has been published in Crypto
> > or Eurocrypt or something first. If you don't know enough to read
> > those conference proceedings, you don't know enough to have an
> > intelligent opinion on the cost of building a machine to run djb's NFS
> > factoring ideas.
> 
> nice attitude. sounds a little bit like "640k is enough for everyone",
> etc.

Do you actually understand the NFS factoring algorithm or not?

If you do not, on what basis are you estimating the cost of hardware
to execute it? If you have no basis, then why do you think you know
anything on the subject?

> understanding as much as to conceive a certain concept, or at least
> to work out an "intelligent opinion" is based on thinking, cognitive
> processes, not just being able to read and understand technoid gibberish.

If you think that the information needed to come to an intelligent
conclusion on the subject is "technoid gibberish", perhaps your
"cognitive processes" aren't operating on the information you need to
state something reasonable on the subject.

> i clearly see your experience, your knowledge. you're in the business for
> quite a while. clinging to your experience so tightly, evolving hardline
> thinking, such as above, might prove to be an obstacle, though. new
> inventions, technologies, just came into existence through people who
> got their own ego out of the way, and did what they envisioned.

This is not a question of old scientist/new scientist. This is the old
scientist telling a guy with a rope trying to lasso the moon that it
is pretty far away, his rope is pretty short, and his arm is unlikely
to be able to throw the rope that far in any case, and the guy with
the rope saying "you're just not a creative thinker!"

More to the point, when the computer scientist sees a guy claim in
public that you can program computers to telepathically read minds and
perhaps the claimant should learn how computers work, when the
scientist hands him an intro text, it does nothing for the
telepathy-claimants credibility to call the intro text "technoid
gibberish".

To be the young turk new scientist who embarrasses the old scientist,
you first have to know the same basic facts the old scientist
knows. Einstein didn't start out by saying "oh, that Newton guy, his
stuff was `technoid gibberish'" to employ the term you seem to have
used for a basic understanding of the field you are claiming to make
pronouncements about.

It is one thing for Dan Bernstein to claim a number field sieve
machine has one likely cost and for Arjen Lenstra to disagree with
him. Both of them have enough information to discuss the area
intelligently -- both can read the literature and come to conclusions
about it. Saying that the basic information on how this all works is
"technoid gibberish" doesn't lend much credibility to your comments.


Perry