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Also worth mentioning are his updated paper, where he goes over a much more complex proof in this style, and the LaTeX style source for structuring proofs this way. It’s pretty well internally documented.
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That was a great paper, too. I appreciate it.
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This is not a great way to analyze cryptographic algorithms. The grains of sand are a good analogy to use for brute force search, but cryptographic attacks are rarely equivalent to pure brute force search on the key space. There is more analysis that has to be done to find the effective key space you would have to search over to have an equivalent level of difficulty.
You don’t need to be a math expert to know this, all the analysis has been done. According to NIST (the relevant paper is here), a 2048-bit RSA key is equivalent to a 112-bit search space, and according to ANSSI it’s equivalent to 100 bits.
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Thanks for the feedback, it’s my first post on the subject. But yes, I understand your point that it’s not the best way to explain it because of algorithms with sub-exponential running time for factoring integers and so on. But I’ve yet to be more familiarised with the details in it, and just wanted to try explain for myself and whoever wanted to read it how big numbers we’re talking about.
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There’s always Merkle puzzles!
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7 bit bytes for the win.
Last year’s DEFCON CTF used an architecture with 9 bit bytes.