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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

> normal people use 2048bit RSA either directly (SSH keys, Website Certs, VPNs)

Any reason for that?

[Almost] all of my SSH and TLS (be it HTTPS or OpenVPN) keys are 4096 bits long.

I wasn't woried about TLAs with supercomputers snooping on my wires, just heard that 4096 bit RSA keys are considered more secure than 2048 while not sacrificing performance much, so I just didn't have the reason to specify lower size.

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When a lot of these tools were first implemented, to get enough entropy, you would have to type and move your mouse for a long time to generate a 1024-bit key. I remember really, really hating that process.

Now, you kids these days with your entropy pools and PRNGs in your CPUs because you had an empty spot on the tape-out...get off my lawn!

    Any reason for that?

OpenSSL's default keylength is 2048? ssh-keygen uses 2048 by default.

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