[staunton]

It's to do with "if we ever have big/good quantum computers, prime factorization is doable" and with "let's use the new shiny things".

On a related note, someone might discover some elliptic curve math tomorrow and your CPU can break all that stuff just as well...

[exe34]

so with my cynic hat on, maybe a bunch of people already have that and that's why we're being moved off the hard stuff.

[staunton]

The NSA had the option to do something like that when they (via NIST) standardized DES.

They chose to standardize a version that's secure against attacks that only they knew at the time, shorten the key length so they can still brute-force it if they really need to, and successfully kept the attack secret until researchers at a foreign university independently discovered it decades later.

[alphager]

Yup, that was the older generation. The newer generation used NIST to propagate a backdoored RNG and to weaken several ECC-curves.