------HEADER END-DONT REMOVE------
> Rob Landley <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > Not that it's worth it. Keys get exponentially more difficult to
> > brute force as the key length increases. I read part of a book a
> > long time ago (might have been called "applied cryptography") that
> > figured out that if you could build a perfectly efficient computer
> > that could do 1 bit's worth of calculation with the the amount of
> > energy in the minimal electron state transition in a hydrogen atom,
> > and you built a dyson sphere around the sun to capture its entire
> > energy output for the however many billion years its expected to
> > last, you wouldn't even brute-force exhaust a relatively small
> > keyspace (128 bits? 256 bits? Something like that).
> >
> > Somebody else here is likely to recognize the above anecdote and give a more
> > accurate reference. Book title and page number would be good...
>
> Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" (second edition, may be in the
> first edition as well), pages 157-158 ("Thermodynamic Limitations").
Remember - this is a dated example, since some theories are beginning
to consider storing & computing data with photons/interference patterns...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: [email protected]
Any opinions expressed are solely my own.