PGP FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS WITH ANSWERS, PART 2/3 Archive-
name: pgp-faq/part2 Posting-Frequency: monthly Last-modified: 22
June 1995 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- ======== 3.
Security Questions ======== 3.1. How secure is PGP? The big
unknown in any encryption scheme based on RSA is whether or not
there is an efficient way to factor huge numbers, or if there is
some backdoor algorithm that can break the code without solving
the factoring problem. Even if no such algorithm exists, it is
still believed that RSA is the weakest link in the PGP chain.
======== 3.2. Can't you break PGP by trying all of the possible
keys? This is one of the first questions that people ask when
they are first introduced to cryptography. They do not
understand the size of the problem. For the IDEA encryption
scheme, a 128 bit key is required. Any one of the 2^128 possible
combinations would be legal as a key, and only that one key
would successfully decrypt all message blocks. Let's say that
you had developed a special purpos