I personally factored 512 bit numbers in 2007 for a lot less than $8, so tbh I'm going to say your overestimation of your knowledge of cryptology is far more hilarious than my paranoia about the potential truth of claims made by people claiming to be experts in cryoptology.
Your claim that factoring a 256bit number would cost fractions of a cent rather than my claim of roughly $3 is also very easily verifiable.
Further I'll note you sound exactly like the kind of person insisting diffie hillman was a good key exchange mechanism prior to Snowdens disclosures. good luck with that.
I'm charitably sharing this to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645216 because someone actually interested in learning things asked the right question. May you sleep less ignorant tonight.
> Further I'll note you sound exactly like the kind of person insisting diffie hillman was a good key exchange mechanism prior to Snowdens disclosures. good luck with that.
Before or after Snowden, Diffie-Hellman (it's Martin Hellman with an “e”) is a good key exchange mechanism! When using it on Z/pZ as field it's not the most practical one nowadays because you need big keys to get the desired security level (exactly the same problem as RSA), but you if you use an elliptic curves instead you can use shorter keys again (and this is exactly what ECDH is doing: it litterally means Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman! Diffie-Hellman went nowhere).
After a week-long precomputation for a specified 512-bit
group, we can compute arbitrary discrete logs in that group
in about a minute.
We find that 82% of vulnerable servers use
a single 512-bit group, allowing us to compromise connections
to 7% of Alexa Top Million HTTPS sites. In response, major
browsers are being changed to reject short groups.
We go on to consider Diffie-Hellman with 768- and 1024-bit
groups. We estimate that even in the 1024-bit case, the computations are plausible given nation-state resources.
512 was known to be too low for a looong time, why do you think it was the export-grade security?
1024 being at risk against state-level adversaries isn't shocking to anyone, but there's a significant gap between this and costing $64, and this gap is much bigger than 10 years of Moore's Law (NSA had much more than 32*$64 of available compute ;).
You're making grandiose claims and there's nothing that holds in your reasoning, it really feels like I'm discussing physics with a flat-earther…
Your claim that factoring a 256bit number would cost fractions of a cent rather than my claim of roughly $3 is also very easily verifiable.
Further I'll note you sound exactly like the kind of person insisting diffie hillman was a good key exchange mechanism prior to Snowdens disclosures. good luck with that.