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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.
Cue tin foil hats.....now!
As the owner of a cryptography website...this news is interesting to hear. I remember people saying that the later sets of problems in RSAs would hold out. Guess not. (Note the growing gaps in dates in the table in TFA). A good read, actually. Congrats, guys.
What if there's a team that started with a slightly slower machine before them and they only needed a few more days to complete the factoring?
From a mathematical and scientific point of view, solving factors in constant time is very interesting. Security based on prime factorization will simply be one technology that will be obsolete if a general algorithm can be found that runs in constant time. I gave it 5 seconds because I don't know how many steps such an algorithm would take, but 15,000,000,000 CPU cycles ought to be enough.
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