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A comment on How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015). Parent comment

Re:How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015) by marcosdumay on Saturday December 17, 2016 @12:46PM (#13201571)
> Are good primes that hard to come by?

My laptop takes around 2 minutes to get a pair of 4k bits primes for DH parameters.

The problem is that people want their installers to be instantaneous. Those 2 minutes are too long.

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Re:How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015) by alkonaut on Saturday December 17, 2016 @02:20PM (#13201975)
A popular app could ship with 100 different primes pre baked and pick one at random? Not perfect but 100x better than having one prime.
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Re:How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015) by marcosdumay on Saturday December 17, 2016 @04:51PM (#13202881)
If those primes are compromised, 100 of them are still useless.
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Re:How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015) by alkonaut on Sunday December 18, 2016 @03:54AM (#13204975)
Yes that's only useful under the original assumption of the article: that a state level actor must use a nontrivial part of its budget to factor one prime. The back of the envelope calculations if they did classical factorization is that one or a few 1024bit primes were possible but 100 were not. Of course next year they will have twice the CPU time, or a better quantum computer, so it's a short term win.
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