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RSA-640 Factored

gslin writes to tell us MathWorld News is reporting that RSA-640 has been factored. F. Bahr, M. Boehm, J. Franke, and T. Kleinjung, memebers of the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security (BSI) announced they had cracked the 193-digit number last Friday using the General Number Field Sieve. The team purportedly used 80 opteron CPUs and 5 months to achieve victory.

25 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    640=2*2*2*2*2*2*2*5.

    What do I win?

  2. Time to turn off the Internet... by adlib24 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I wish had nothing better to do for five moths than factor numbers...geez...who needs the Internet when there are numbers to factor. :)

  3. Congrats by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    The answer was 42!
    Now what was the question

  4. Hmmm. by jd · · Score: 4, Funny

    The German Federal Government is short on cash, I know, but resorting to funding the "Agency for Information Technology Security" by winning RSA contests? Besides, if they're so up on IT security, why didn't they just cheat by logging onto RSA's computers?

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  5. Arrgh! by Ventriloquate · · Score: 5, Funny

    My TI-82 was just about to solve that one!

  6. Re:One of Bill Gates' dreams... by et764 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, he certainly failed miserably at using less than 640k.

  7. Re:Irrelevant by woolio · · Score: 1, Funny
    Unfortunately, that algorithm is still not available.
    AHEM! More like FORTUNATELY that algorithm is still not available!
  8. I got part of it by pHatidic · · Score: 4, Funny

    I knew that one of the factors ended in a 1 and the other ended in a 9 or that they both ended in 3. Am I eligible to split the prize?

    1. Re:I got part of it by stevey · · Score: 4, Funny
      Turns out these number anomalies only happen with base-10 numbers. When you have base-16 numbers, these mysterious relationships of the last digits disappear.

      If only there were some magical way of turning numbers from base-16 into base-10. Then those tricks would suddenly be useful again...

  9. "640 bits... by Joe+Random · · Score: 4, Funny

    should be enough for anyone."

  10. Dual Cores by Zuul42 · · Score: 2, Funny
    If they had waited three months, they could have used dual core CPUs and solved it in half the time.

    Oh wait. No, that wouldn't have worked. Nevermind.

  11. Zombie Cluster by happyEverGeek · · Score: 5, Funny

    I wonder how long it would have taken 1.5 million zombie PCs.

    --
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  12. An idea by bradbeattie · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why don't we just start using 1.44mb encryption keys. We'd finally have a use for all of these floppies.

    1. Re:An idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Of course you know that a 1.44MB formatted disk(FAT formatted) only has 1.38MB of free space. So we would need 2 damn disks for your 1.44MB key.

  13. Re:celeron's by scbysnx · · Score: 2, Funny

    I think he was joking.. I hope he was joking

  14. Re:I'll wait for RSA-2048 by adlib24 · · Score: 5, Funny
    Of course we would only do perfectly harmless things... like...um...use Xbox Live to construct a cluster to factor RSA-4096. ;)

    p.s. all your xbox is belong to us.

  15. RSA Cracked by Joseph_V · · Score: 4, Funny

    And in only 5 months... how P Q ular.

  16. One of the great Two problems Solved by icecow · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...now if he could just find his keys.

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  17. Unix factor fails me again! by spinfire · · Score: 3, Funny

    factor:
    `3107418240490043721350750035888567930037346022842 72754572016194882320644051808150455634682967172328 67824379162728380334154710731085019195485290073377 24822783525742386454014691736602477652346609' is too large

  18. Re:Factor? by lachlan76 · · Score: 2, Funny

    The cipher in The Sum Of All Fears was actually One-Time Pad.

    And yes, I am a Tom Clancy fanboy ;)

  19. What a guy! by Ponzicar · · Score: 2, Funny

    I don't know who this general Steve is, but he must be one heck of a math whiz!

  20. Re:Factor? by obender · · Score: 5, Funny
    but an algorithm may exist that can factor primes in polynomial time

    Bill Gates wrote something similar in The Road Ahead:

    The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.

    Sorry to break it to you boys but I know an algorithm that can do that in constant time: the factors of any prime number are 1 and the number itself.

  21. It works in all bases. by lheal · · Score: 5, Funny

    For any base b, the sum of the digits (in base b) of a multiple of (b-1) add to a multiple of (b-1). The proof is fairly simple: http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/2002/maths/divby9/.

    For instance, in base 16, 3 * F (45 dec) is 2D, and 2+D=F.

    This leads to a (slow) algorithm for primality check. For a given number r, simply (hah!) check all the bases up to about log_b(r) to see if all your base r belong to us.

    --
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  22. I got 100% by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Funny

    I have an even better one. If you convert the number to binary, you'll observe it ends in 1. The only way to get that from two numbers is if they both end in 1. So here's your first digit with 100% certainty!

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  23. Re:Factor? by Musteval · · Score: 2, Funny

    You ARE using a one-time pad. It's just that the method of getting the pad to the other person is quantum in nature, making it completely secure. And as we all know, one-time pads are unbreakable if they are random and the key is not intercepted and the government doesn't use TEMPEST to read our screens and our computers don't have keyloggers and nobody has a secret camera hidden in the building and we mask our keystrokes so that computer that MIT made can't tell what we're typing just from the sounds and we wipe our hard drives afterwards and then set them on fire and melt them and put them into the fusion reactor that is being built and ...

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