Slashdot Mirror
RSA-576 Factored
An anonymous reader writes "I thought Slashdot would have picked this up
several days ago, but apparently not. Although
you still won't see any mention of it on the
RSA challenge site, Mathworld is carrying the news that a team at the German Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik submitted a factorization of
RSA-576 on December 3. RSA-576 is the smallest challenge number that RSA Security offers a cash prize for, to the tune of $10,000"
When people talk about 128 bit encryption being hard to break they are talking about symmetric algorithms such as Blowfish. A 128 bit symmetric algorithm is still very, very tough to crack a key for.
This particular challenge is for the RSA algorithm which is an asymmetric algorithm. They require much longer keys to be secure. Right now most people recommend at least a 2048 bit key for RSA and plenty of people are using 4096 bit keys.
Comparativly, it should be a long, long time before anyone is worried about their current keys. Back in the day when PGP came out, it was fairly common for people to use a 512 bit key with RSA, but most used 1024. Those people could be concerned at this point that their old messages could be cracked.