On May 17, 2013 11:29 AM, "David Vorick" <david.vorick@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Why are so many bits necessary? Isn't 128bits technically safe against brute force? At 256 bits you are pretty much safe from any volume of computational power that one could fathom within this century.

It sounds like you might be mixing up public key and symmetric ciphers.  128 bits is indeed fine for a symmetric cipher, though if you think quantum computing is around the corner you want 256.

But for public key ciphers, you're not worried about brute force searches: you're worried about factoring (for RSA-based stuff) or about discrete logarithms (for DH-based stuff including ElGamal, DSA, etc etc etc).  Opinions differ on adequate key length, but may folks think that 2048-3072 bits is about right for RSA or for DH in Z_p*, whereas 192-256 bits is about right for DH in elliptic curve groups. Some conservative folks want more bits; some brave folks want fewer.

--
Nick