Re: Factoring - State of the Art and Predictions

[Zachary <zachary@pentagon.io.com>]

This touches on something I was thinking the other day:  Most
cryptosystems that we seem to use are based on the assumption that
factoring large numbers is a Hard Problem.  Isn't this putting all our
eggs in one basket?  Are there other Hard Problems crypto systems can be
based on?  In the ludicrous case, suppose Eve is visited by aliens and
given a black box that would instantly factor a number irrelevant of its
size... how much of current cryptography would this device invalidate? 
I'm no crypto-expert, so I don't know... but surely there are other hard
problems in the universe that we can base crypto on...

 --Zachary