The Curse of Cryptographic Numerology

The problem of cryptographic numerology has plagued modern cryptography throughout most of its life. The basic concept is that as long as your encryption keys are at least "this big," you\´re fine, even if none of the surrounding infrastructure benefits from that size or even works at all. The application of cryptographic numerology conveniently directs attention from the difficult to the trivial, because choosing a key size is fantastically easy, whereas making the crypto work effectively is really hard.