[1859] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Certicom offers crypto contest
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arnold G. Reinhold)
Tue Nov 18 15:45:39 1997
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.95.971117155156.1235F-100000@kizmiaz.dis.org>
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 09:44:59 -0400
To: William Knowles <erehwon@dis.org>, cryptography@c2.net
From: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>
Cc: DC-Stuff <dc-stuff@dis.org>
At 3:54 PM -0800 11/17/97, William Knowles wrote:
>URL: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,16287,00.html
>
>Taking a cue from a competitor, Canadian encryption vendor Certicom
>has issued a challenge to cryptographers, mathematicians, and hackers
>to try to break its elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) algorithms.
>
>Certicom is offering prizes of up to $100,000 for the first person to
>break its keys, including some it believes can be broken.
>
>The challenge is similar to contests run by Certicom rival RSA Data
>Security to illustrate that weak encryption algorithms--the only kind
>approved for export by the U.S. government--can be cracked.
>
>Certicom aims to publicize its encryption as an alternative to RSA's,
>since elliptic curve cryptography is frequently challenged as being
>"untested" compared to RSA's algorithms, which have been well-known
>for years.
>
The RSA 129 Challange was printed in Scientific American in 1977 and was
broken by volunteers lead by Atkins, Graff, Lenstra and Leyland in 1994.
They in turn built on hundreds of years of research on the factoring
problem. I'd let mathematicians whack at ECC at least until 2014 before
I'd trust the short key lengths they propose.
Arnold Reinhold
