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Win $200,000 In RSA's Factoring Challenge
BetaRelease writes: "All ye with excess CPU cycles to spare. Here's a chance to win as much as $200,000. Join RSA's Factoring Challenge." That means you can get $10,000 for figuring out the factors for this laughably easy, completely trivial number, or twenty times that if you can figure out a slightly nastier one. While it would probably take more horsepower to win any of the prizes than the prize money could pay for, admit it would be cool to trade a 98-digit number for a few years' salary.
i've decided i'm going to spend any free time i have at work on this project.
i've just requisitioned 8,000 reams of paper and 5000 number 2 pencils. wish me luck.
RSA is offering this money to show that the RSA public key method IS secure, because we can't factor these numbers.
Well let's see ...
... None are even ... nope.
... None of the digit sums is divisible by 3 ... nope.
... None end in 5 or 0 ... nope.
... Well, I'm out of ideas.
2
3
5
7
Just for the hell of it, I tried hitting "Submit" with a blank submission of factors. Mostly, I was curious to see if they were using SSL for submissions because what if someone was snooping and intercepted my submission and then submitted it themself. Hey, it could happen!
Anyways, no they don't use SSL, but more surprisingly, they care who your referrer was. And they say "slashdot not found in list of allowed referrers". Not sure if this would actually prevent a legitimate submission, but maybe you don't want to risk clicking thru Slashdot to RSA when you find the real factors. (Especially considering the lack of SSL.)
Error Message:
slashdot not found in list of allowed referrers.
Required Field: email has not been completed.
Required Field: Submitters has not been completed.
Required Field: challnum has not been completed.
Required Field: p has not been completed.
Required Field: q has not been completed.
Required Field: description has not been completed.
Please use your 'back' button to return to the Web form.
The current record factorings were done with the GNFS (General Number Field Sieve).
GNFS consists of a sieving phase that searches a fixed set of prime numbers for candidates that have a particular algebraic relationship, modulo the number to be factored. This is followed by a matrix solving phase that creates a large matrix from the candidate values, then solves it to determine the factors.
The sieving phase may be done in distributed fashion, on a large number of processors simultaneously. The matrix solving phase requires massive amounts of storage and is typically performed on a large supercomputer.
Some pointers:
In case you haven't noticed...It isn't easy, and cannot be fully solved using a distributed.net technique.
to factor a 760-bit number in one year would require 215,000 Pentium-class machines, each with 4 Gigabytes of physical RAM.
to factor a 1620-bit number in one year would require 1.6 x 10^15 Pentium-class machines, each with 120 Terrabytes of physical RAM.
Good luck.
Yes I am planning on using all my school labs computers to win this one. But I only ask one favor.
Can you raise the prized to $415,000 instead. I might need it.
Two Towers-Two Worlds.One seeks triumphs and freedom for man.The other deems man unworthy and wrecks them.