128-bit crypto scheme allegedly cracked in two hours
Crypto researchers are preparing to scatter the ashes of a class of Discrete Logarithm Problems (DLPs) as the future of security, following a claim by Swiss researchers to have cracked a 128-bit crypto scheme in two hours.
So as not to frighten the horses, The Register will start by pointing out that our understanding of this paper at Arxiv doesn't mean the schemes you're now using have been broken. Rather, the work by researchers at EPFL in Switzerland excludes crypto based on “supersingular curves” from future consideration.
As the Lausanne-based polytechnic states in its media release, “Whereas it was believed that it would take 40,000 times the age of the universe for all computers on the planet to do it”, the supersingular curve DLP algorithm only lasted two hours on the 24-core cluster used to crack it.
