Factors Found in 200-Digit RSA Challenge

diodesign writes "The two unique prime factors of a 200-digit number have been discovered by researchers at Bonn University (Germany) and the CWI (Netherlands). The number is the largest integer yet factored with a general purpose algorithm and was one of a series of such numbers issued as a challenge by security company RSA security in March 1991 in order to track the real-world difficulty of factoring such numbers, used in the public-key encryption algorithm RSA. RSA-200 beats the previous record number 11281+1 (176 digits, factored on May 2nd, 2005), and RSA-576 (174 digits, factored on December 3rd, 2003)."

Comments

Re:Notation?

[iMaple]

Does anyone know what the notation "11281+1" means?

It means 11282 :) .
There seems to be a typo in the article post (A typo on slashdaot .. thats news ..I mean just one typo thats cool). Its probably due to some filter. It should say 11^281 +1

Re:55 CPU years

[TedCheshireAcad]

Another victory for the General Number Field Sieve (I think). The article was a little light on the details, but it mentioned they used a "general algorithm", which I'm assuming is the GNFS. The original paper may shed some light on the algorithm, for the algebraically inclined Slashdotter. (Link courtesty of Google Scholar)