I've often heard the claim that elliptic curve cryptography is not used much in practice compared to RSA. I don't doubt its true but I would like to have some evidence for it so I can also say it without being a parrot.
I don't know anything about real world implementations of cryptography. How can I go about getting data that RSA is more widely used?
Well, probably the most widely used cryptography is SSL, specifically the kind used in HTTPS. The whole HTTPS ecosystem revolves around certificates authorities that sign your RSA key. So on that fact alone, I would say there's more RSA out there than ECC.
SSH is also very widely used and it has traditionally used RSA keys, though it supports DSA keys, too and, more recently, ECDSA (the "EC" being elliptic curve). Sadly, Mac OS X's built in openssh is an older version that doesn't support ECDSA and apparently Redhat turns off ECDSA support for some sort of legal/patent reasons. So that's another case where RSA is more popular.
SSL/X.509 and that whole ecosystem can use ECDSA based certificates and ECDH as key exchange, because it is explicitly designed to allow multiple variants of encryption algorithms.
There are relatively many widely deployed systems that use ECC because of resource constrains (short signatures, mainly). For example both Microsoft's product keys and FlexLM use something that is at least described in marketing materials as ECDSA.
It's either collecting call metadata on US citizens or open war mongering? I was going to say that you're giving a false choice but then I realized there doesn't really seem to be a connection between the choices you're giving.
I agree. I email my friends, or see them in person so I know what's going on in their lives. Too often people only want to analyze facebook as an organizational tool. But there is a great entertainment component built in as well.
You get to learn the kind of personal information about your past acquaintances that otherwise you could only get by going to a reunion. You can find out if anyone you thought would be successful has ended up struggling, if anyone you thought was a slacker has done something interesting, if that person who is attractive, and successful is somehow also a nice person, etc.
Spending a few minutes looking at this kind of trivia can be a lot more fun than yet another youtube cat and the game only gets more interesting the more friends you have on facebook.
The study of solutions to equations only in the positive integers, or other subsets of integers also falls under Diophantine equations, as far as I know.
Subset sum problems are obviously decidable since the number of values that must be tried to find a solution is finite. However, subset sum is NP complete even when restricted to positive integers [Garey and Johnson, p223] so there is no polynomial time algorithm.
It is NP-complete in the weak sense: the reduction from, say, CNF-SAT, introduces very large coefficients (in the order of 2^n). The pseudo-polynomial algorithm has complexity linear in the magnitude of the coefficients, not in the size of their binary representation (hence pseudo). If the coefficients are small, that algorithm is efficient. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-polynomial_time
I don't have access to the original paper but from the summary here http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/study.asp?id=13 it looks like the study was only observational, roles were not randomly assigned.
I had a brief look at the paper. I got stuck on the section about scalability. I can't see how that could be implemented so that authentication can be done given that the nodes are untrusted (by which I mean implemented with a much smaller amount of computation and storage than was required in the non-optimized approach).
True, you're going to need gigabytes of memory. My test client used over 6 gigabytes o memry after small inventory injection play. I have a few great ideas how to create efficient propagating attacks, but I haven't yet tried those.
Right, this wouldn't even be news, noone cares. Is the topic of this thread in the news? AP phone logs are recently, echelon was previously, noone cares about CISPA, SOPA, AT&T diverting traffic for NSA (wired - http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619 - did you hear about this one on CNN?) etc in mainstream news. The media would quickly label this 'conspiracy' and people would turn off their minds largely like your response.
Even if there were multiple whistleblowers on something like this the individuals would be attacked on their character and it would move onto the next (wikileaks). Writers would be most likely committing career suicide attacking something that big even with lots of evidence.
If our security agencies aren't doing this we are going to fail, the Chinese, Russians are all doing this even as recent at the Chinese attacks on Google. It is almost always flaws in software that facilitate the communication not the algorithms themselves.
You could easily test this. Modify OpenSSL (which recently had a keygen issue making weaker keys and has had holes before: http://www.gartner.com/id=676807), then upload an app that allows encrypted communication and when you upload it to Apple answer the question of 'Yes' to using new cryptography. They are mainly there for export controls but you won't be able to publish that app without an FBI/NSA review if you had added new cryptography algorithms, they have to be approved. Good luck if you send any messages to geopolitical sensitive places without an approved algo or library.
On another note, don't buy into golden ratio hype. The supposed "beauty" of this ratio and its appearance "over and over again" in nature is one of those myths that just can't be killed. Every human should be made to read
I don't know anything about real world implementations of cryptography. How can I go about getting data that RSA is more widely used?