Fraud attempt

[Peoplesoft bloke]

ID cards are not being driven by the politicians. Trust me on this.

I totally agree - and that lack of democratic accountability is one of many reasons I oppose them.

[EternalOptimist]

and who 'presents to a bank' any more ???


I havn't been inside a bank for donkeys years

[TykeMerc]

All other nonesense aside from this thread, I hope you get this sorted out Ken.

[Incognito]

Quantum computing may not be here, but it's trivial for a criminal organisation to take advantage of a botnet. Distributing complex problems amongs a few million compromised machines means you, too, can have the kind of computing capacity that once only GCHQ or the NSA could dream of.

(And I'm not a "sudden crypto expert" - in the past I've worked in the field on products used by banks and governments around the world, including both the UK and US governments.)

Yes Nick I'm sure that's what will happen. Your typical Romainian fraudster is going to phone up his mate in Bucharest to turn his multi million pound generating Storm botnet off so that he can use it to crunch some numbers for a couple of months just so he can capture the key pair which was used to sign the original data.



More likely

http://www.lildude.co.uk/cracking-40...sa-encryption/

(p.s. there's a clue in the strength of encryption at the other end of that link)

More likely they'll exploit the weakest link in the chain, the human element. As it always has been and how it always will be.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

All other nonesense aside from this thread, I hope you get this sorted out Ken.

Seconded.

[Incognito]

A very laborious paper, I know you're intelligent Nick and like Maths related subjects, you may enjoy it more than I did the 3rd time I tried to read it.

Thus,
576 bits will take 10.9 times as long as RSA-512 and require 3.3 times the memory.
768 bits will take 6100 times as long as RSA-512 and require 77 times the memory.
1024 bits will take 7 million times as long as RSA-512 and require 2650 times the memory.

Note: Space scaling is the same for both the sieving phase and for storing the matrix.

To put this in perspective, it would require about 1.4 billion 500 MHz machines, each with about 170 Gbytes of memory to do the sieving for a 1024-bit number in the same time as RSA-512. While a hacker might try to steal cycles on the Internet by creating a ?Number Field Sieve Worm? it is hard to see how such an attack could find enough machines with enough memory to make such an attack feasible. Further, such an attack would be detected and shut down rather quickly as with the Robert Morris worm. Of course increasing speed will reduce the required number accordingly. It would take a single Cray with 6 Terabytes of memory approximately 70 million days (192,000 years) to solve the matrix. One could reduce this to a mere 19 years with 10000 Crays each with only 600 Mbytes of memory running perfectly in parallel. It is likely that within 10 years common desktop machines will be as fast or faster than a Cray C90 is now. However, it is unlikely in the extreme that 10000 machines running in parallel will be anywhere close to 10000 times as fast as one machine. It would require 10 million such machines running perfectly in parallel to solve the matrix in about the same time as that for RSA-512.

http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2088

I'm not saying it's unbreakable, no system is 'unbreakable' what it does do though is make it very cost ineffective to attempt to circumvent it.

[Incognito]

and who 'presents to a bank' any more ???


I havn't been inside a bank for donkeys years

How often do you open a new account / lose your bank card?

[TykeMerc]

How often do you open a new account / lose your bank card?

The last time I opened an account I was over 1000 miles from the branch, I've had to replace 1 card in the last 5 years and that was done by phone and post.

Apart from being close so I nipped in to drop in a cheque a relative had sent me a year or so ago I don't think I've set foot in a bank branch for about 3 years.
I'm probably the exception rather than the rule that I do have my personal, savings and mortgage accounts at a branch under a mile from my house, my business account is over 200 miles away in London although their parent company has its UK base about 8 miles away.

[RichardCranium]

20-odd years ago I was working on a retail system and using a card reader/writer. We had lots of fun reading all sorts of cards' mag stripes, editing them, writing them back and seeing what happens at the library / cash machine / bank. Making duplicates of the cards was fun too.

Meanwhile Joe Public believed the banks when the banks said they were secure.

(Dammit, the sort code, account number, pin number and were in plain text on the stripe on my cash card! So the cash machine was writing back to the card every time it was used.)


Anway, ID cards will simply be copied and/or stolen. Like used bank notes and diamonds, it won't be long before a truck load or depot full of the damn things gets stolen.

[doodab]

A very laborious paper, I know you're intelligent Nick and like Maths related subjects, you may enjoy it more than I did the 3rd time I tried to read it.



http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2088

I'm not saying it's unbreakable, no system is 'unbreakable' what it does do though is make it very cost ineffective to attempt to circumvent it.

RSA and other asymmetric algorithms are quite expensive, so generally they are only used to encrypt and transfer a shorter key (typically 128 or 256 bits) for a more efficient symmetric algorithm. Notwithstanding the potential for advances in number theory, you wouldn't brute force the asymmetric encryption, you'd attack the symmetric cypher that's used "on the wire".