Re:NYU Accidentally Exposed Military Code-Breaking Computer
by tptacek on Thursday May 11, 2017 @07:51PM
(#14320445)
I'm not discounting it; it's simply orthogonal to the story. We already know NSA spends huge on compute. None of us are surprised that they have a custom supercomputer contracted from IBM. So we can't derive from that revelation that they've got a viable attack on RSA-2048 --- which, by the way, if they did, would be some of the most closely held information in the world, as there is nothing on the horizon (short of QC) suggesting RSA-2048 will ever fall.
If they had a break on RSA, that would be the story!
You seem to also be completely discounting the possibility of implementation flaws or unpublished advancements against RSA that simply require a ton of hardware to pull off.
What if we don't know that a major RSA implementation is leaking enough key material that it brings the attack down from physically impossible to really really hard?