Serge Vaudenay, chargé de recherche au CNRS:
« L'étalonnage de la complexité des problèmes cryptographiques est indispensable pour proposer le meilleur compromis entre efficacité et securité. La performance technique realisée par Robert Harley constitue un resultat de premier ordre dans cette perspective. »
Andrew Odlyzko, Head of Mathematics and Cryptography Research at AT&T Labs:
"A great achievement that demonstrates the value of fruitfully harnessing some of the huge computational power of the Internet that is idle most of the time" and that "validates theoretical security predictions, and demonstrates the need to keep increasing cryptographic key sizes to protect against growing threats."
Dr. Robert Zuccherato, senior cryptographer in the advanced security technology group at Entrust Technologies Inc.:
"Successful efforts like this one, while demonstrating the weakness in practice of short keys, also confirm the security level achieved by the 160-bit or longer keys used in commercial elliptic-curve cryptosystems. Entrust Technologies was pleased to provide resources to assist in this project."
Arjen K. Lenstra, Vice President at Citibanks's Corporate Technology Office in New York and one of the main contributors to the recent successful attack on the 512-bit RSA challenge, compared the two computational efforts and noted that the present result makes 160-bit ECC keys look even better compared to 1024-bit RSA keys, from a security point of view.
"Ideally we would like new theoretical advances to further reinforce these practical results, although such advances appear out of reach for the moment."
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