How secure is PGP? - Brute Force attacks
- A brute force attack would require 10^38 attempts to recover the key. If there was a processor which could try 1,000,000,000 keys per second, and you used 1,000,000,000 of them at once, it would take 10^13 years.
- Use 10^24 of them, and you could do it in 24 hours - but there isn’t enough matter in the universe to build them
- The maths relies heavily on prime numbers, but there is no easy way to check whether or not a number is prime.
- If you could store a number in a single atom, there is still not enough matter in the universe to store all of the prime numbers up to 512 bits in length