[elfman2]

"ROFL. Brute force doesn't get you anywhere."

<g> Maybe you better do more investigating and less ROTF. (Though admittedly, it's not pure brute force.)

[No.6]

Umhmm. 512-bit is trivial to break, PGP goes 1024 to 2048 bit, and that's an open method; governments and other covert groups undoubtedly do more. Even dedicated factoring circuits won't stop the fact that it is always easier to just add more bits. I'm not even touching 'fractal' crypto (because, for one thing, I haven't done the research on it)

The goal of crypto isn't, by the way, to make the plaintext unreadable forever. It's just to make it unreadable until its intelligence value degrades. For example, if Rommel had a coded msg from 3rd Army HQ and didn't get plaintext until 6/7/1944, it's kinda old news...