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he European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) is working on a new super fast Internet infrastructure called Grid. CERN, the particle physics center based in Geneva that created the web, has built “the grid,” a replacement for the Internet is expected to be 10,000 times faster than the regular broadband speed.

The UK’s Times Online has published a story on how a new “grid” computing project, designed to capture data from CERN’s (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) new Large Hadron Collider or LHC, the world’s largest particle accelerator due to be switched on in the European summer – or in other words, soon. The Times Online article quotes David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a ‘leading figure in the grid project’, as saying that the grid technology being used to capture data from the LHC project “could revolutionise society”, saying specifically that: “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine”.

It took almost 15 years and $8 billion to construct for CERN. The LHC is located in a 27-km circular tunnel 100 meters below ground level outside Geneva on the Franco-Swiss border. It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria by analyzing 140m compounds, an undertaking that would have taken 420 years on a standard internet-linked PC.

Given the fact that most countries are still struggling with ADSL2+, fibre rollouts, WiMAX networks and 3.5G HSPA upgrades to existing 2G and 3G networks, CERN’s superfast broadband grid project is certainly making plenty of waves on the international technology news circuit.

But the reality is that consumers will have to likely wait years before the technology is sufficiently advanced – and affordable enough – to be made available for consumers. Still… the prospect sounds cool, and more speed is always better!

A 307-digit encryption key has been broken down into primes, and 1024-bit RSA keys are next, according to encryption researchers. Researchers from the University of Lausanne, the University of Bonn, and NTT DoCoMo have broken a new record in discovering the prime factors of a “special” 307-digit number this month, which took 11 months and roughly 100 years of computer time. The number was cracked using the special number field sieve method developed by cryptology professor Arjen Lenstra in the 1980s.

The 307-digit number itself was not an RSA key—the number was 2¹⁰³⁹-1, and RSA keys are typically generated by multiplying together two very large prime numbers, each at around 150 digits apiece. But the project shows that given enough time and computer power, the 1024-bit encryption keys used on many e-commerce sites could also be cracked in the not-so-distant future.

“Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to a nonspecial, hard-to-factor number,” Lenstra said in a statement, referring to a 155-digit number that his team had broken previously. More recently, a 200-digit non-special number was factored in 18 months and roughly 50 years of computer time. This 307-digit crack took even less (human) time, which Lenstra credits to more powerful computers and improved code. “I will not make predictions [about the future of 1024-bit encryption], but let us just say that it might be a good idea to stay tuned.”

Why does anyone care? While your average Joe or Jane on the street will not be able to crack a 1024-bit RSA key anytime soon, experienced attackers might not have such a hard time. Getting the computing power to crack a 1024-bit key could be as easy as employing a decent-sized botnet or two.

When asked whether 1024-bit RSA keys are dead, Lenstra said: “The answer to that question is an unqualified yes.” Hopefully, my bank is paying attention to these developments.

Original Article at Ars.