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$200,000 to the first person to break Telegram

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Re: $200,000 to the first person to break Telegram

#122
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In #5, Schneier says "For public-key cryptography, 2048-bit keys have same sort of property; longer is meaningless." Back in September, he issued a new public key of 4096 bits[1]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6376954

If there's anything that's certain, it's the progress of compute power. The fact that his statement lasted 14 years is impressive. I mean, 640K ought to be enough for anyone.

No, not at all. Requiring an increase of 2048 bits over 14 years implies that computing power increases by a factor of 216 every year.

Re: $200,000 to the first person to break Telegram

#125
post #122
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's anything that's certain, it's the progress of compute power. The fact that his statement lasted 14 years is impressive. I mean, 640K ought to be enough for anyone.

No, not at all. Requiring an increase of 2048 bits over 14 years implies that computing power increases by a factor of 2 16 every year.

You need to factor in speedups due to advances in factoring algorithms, too. And it's possible that the software doesn't have any options between 2048 and 4096. (I have no idea, I didn't check.)

Re: $200,000 to the first person to break Telegram

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's probably against the rules of the competition and will get you arrested if you try. But I think if someone does break into their central server and wins the competition that way, they should still be paid out.

I'm afraid breaking into Telegram's central server (by the way, there is no such thing) will hardly enable you to decipher end-to-end encrypted secret chats. But certainly worth trying anyway.

Is there a staging server I can have root on?

Re: $200,000 to the first person to break Telegram

#129
Although i have limited knowledge of crypto, but the algorithm seems pretty similar to what is used in SSL with key exchange via DH and encryption via AES. Although i notice that instead of a server clients are doing key creation and exchange which is why Telegram may be calling the architecture 'decentralized'. What is new here, how is it Telegram's own encryption method? Just having a ssl like client to client security model is what is being coined as MTProto?
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