Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

RSA-640 Factored

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the bigger-better-deal dept.

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.

2 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. WTF is the General Number Field Sieve... by acidblood · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...many are asking. It's hard to find introductory materials on the NFS, because the number of people who actually understand the algorithm is probably in the hundreds, if not less, and most are worried about research not teaching. For those interested in a high-level view, plus some low-level details, of the (special and general) NFS, you can have a look at the slides for a talk that I gave on exactly this topic at a crypto workshop a couple of months ago. I won't even try to summarize the NFS here, because anything other than a very high level, handwaving, bird's eye view of NFS would take the better part of a page to explain. However, in this thread I can answer specific questions that anyone might have about the talk above.

    Now for those with the mathematical maturity to delve into the algorithm, I suggest the book Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective by R. Crandall and C. Pomerance (link to Amazon.com lifted from Google, no referrals), which is certainly one of the best introductions to the algorithm that I have read.

    By the way, if anyone wants to help perform huge factorizations in a distributed computing network, check out the NFSNET, although they mostly apply SNFS on values from the Cunningham tables, no cryptographic targets.

    --

    Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/

  2. Re:celeron's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    celeron's
    (Score:1, Funny)
    by rufuseddy (781982) on Tuesday November 08, @11:35PM (#13985872)
    (http://www.oceighty.net/)
    blah, if they would of used 80 celeron's they would have cracked it twice as fast.......

    Dude, what's wrong with you? You wrote "would of"[sic] and "would have" in the same sentence! To make matters worse, you didn't capitalize a proper noun ("Celeron"), you used an apostrophe before an "s" in a plural twice, you didn't capitalize the first word of a sentence, and you ended your "sentence" with seven periods. Go back to the fifth grade. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars.