Comment Re:Not relevant (Score 1) 55
Shamir is touting this design, but not to get people to demand much longer keys. I saw him talk a few weeks ago, and he was careful to emphasize that while the TWINKLE device could make it reasonably easy to crack 512 bit RSA, it won't touch 768 or 1024 bit keys.
The TWINKLE device simply makes factoring large composites of primes a couple of orders of magnitude faster than it is now. The best known factoring algorithms are super-polynomial, so making keys large enough to overcome any constant increase in computing speed is not difficult.
Also, note that the design is not very "blue sky". It is not a general-purpose optical computer. It uses a property of light - that it can be used to implement very large, imprecise adders - to massively speed up part of a factoring algorithm.
The TWINKLE device simply makes factoring large composites of primes a couple of orders of magnitude faster than it is now. The best known factoring algorithms are super-polynomial, so making keys large enough to overcome any constant increase in computing speed is not difficult.
Also, note that the design is not very "blue sky". It is not a general-purpose optical computer. It uses a property of light - that it can be used to implement very large, imprecise adders - to massively speed up part of a factoring algorithm.
