Policy-Discussion

[<Lambert.Hofstra AT ins.com>]

Ian wrote:
> 1b is harder.  How do we stop a covert signing path into the CA?
 
This triggered me an resulted in the following question: how can we make sure 
the private key has not been reconstructed by some kind of brute force attack?
 
You all  know that password attacks are not done brute force (brute force 
attacks on a long password can take years) , but by lookups in a table with 
precalculated hashes (rainbow table lookup, crack a password in 
milliseconds). 
What would stop a dedicated foreign agency to start generating rainbow tables 
for public/private key pairs? If well funded, they can build dedicated 
hardware for it, and once such a table is created they can simply do a lookup 
to find any private key based on the public key in milliseconds...
I'm not a crypto specialist, so could someone give an indication of the 
number of valid public/private key pair with 1024bit key size?
Am I missing something?
 
Lambert

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