Google Starts Upgrading Its SSL Certificates To 2048-bit Keys 118
An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced it has already started upgrading all of its SSL certificates to 2048-bit keys. The goal is to beef up the encryption on the connections made to its services. Google says the upgrade, which includes the root certificate that the company uses to sign all of its SSL certificates, will be completed 'in the next few months.' Previously, however, Google was more specific and said it was aiming to finish the process by the end of 2013."
Re:Doesn't need to... (Score:2, Interesting)
A 768-bit RSA key was factored in late 2009. 1024-bit should be trivial for the NSA, although not trivial in the sense that they don't need to be selective about their target.
Just because there's no known algorithm to factor primes easily doesn't mean that there aren't practical optimizations to help improve performance. Most of the time when you hear that it takes "thousands of years" to factor a prime number, the speaker is only taking into consideration the most brain dead methods. Cryptographers are continually advancing the state-of-the-art. Clock-for-clock, we can factor primes much faster today than just a few years ago. And you can imagine that the NSA is probably far ahead of academia, if only because as an engineering problem they have vastly more experience in the domain. 10% here, 10% there, and before you know it you've improved runtime by 1x, 2x, 10x, etc.
Re:Completely useless... (Score:2, Interesting)
The nice story about working hard and helping find contraband....
ie nobody in the West is going to let an East Germany forget about what happens on the Wall.
We now all know the truth about the US brands and their legal positions wrt your plaintext.