Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Simon Spero <ses AT unc.edu>]

On Jul 26, 2004, at 9:13 PM, Calvin Powers wrote:

> instead of the one you show the IRS, well, the stronger the better, in 
> theory. But in practice anyone that would want to break into your 
> message would probably do a brute force attack on the underlying  bulk 
> encryption so there comes a point of diminishing returns in which the 
> bigger keys don't really buy that much more additional protection.

The article Tom cites explictly factors in the relative cost of 
breaking the symmetric cypher vs that used for the  key-exchange, and 
leans towards stronger public keys  on the grounds that if you use a 
public key to hide 100 session keys, breaking that key might be worth 
100 times breaking any one of those session keys.

But see: http://www.itsecurity.com/asktecs/may201.htm