🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Mar8.221121.1017@ll.mit.edu> twade@llex.ll.mit.edu ( Timothy Wade) writes:
-> Without this patent, which certainly comes under the kind the FSF
->wishes to abolish, we would have widespread secure Email. You'd be
->able to authenticate your identity to anyone you wished. Many privacy
->issues would become moot, because it would no longer be easy to spy
->on one's personal business.
-
-Well to implement RSA and make it even moderately secure ( It's been
- two years since I've followed factoring technology and was working in
-the public key area) you need special purpose hardware.  Modulo
-exponentiation in the hundreds or thousands of bits is pretty tough
-you know.  
-A Cylink chip will do it for you but it is pretty expensive
-( $500 ).  You just can't do it in software so I don't think it would
-become that widespread anyways because of hardware issues. 

Say what?  Modular exponentiation in software is cake, if you're clever
about it.  Sure, you can do it a lot faster with special-purpose
hardware, but then again, that's true of just about any problem, isn't
it?

BTW, you don't need huge exponents for the encryption...you can get
away with cubing the plaintext modulo pq.  See Knuth or the original
RSA paper for details.  (The decryption, of course, would probably 
require the multi-hundred-bit exponents...)

What I want to know is:  why are we being asked to boycott MIT?  I
thought the RSA patent was held by "RSA technologies" or some such
entity.

-- Jim Lewis