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A Mighty Number Falls

Posted by kdawson on from the time-to-generate-new-keys dept.

space_in_your_face writes "An international team has broken a long-standing record in an impressive feat of calculation. On March 6, computer clusters from three institutions (the EPFL, the University of Bonn, and NTT in Japan) reached the end of eleven months of strenuous calculation, churning out the prime factors of a well-known, hard-to-factor number — 2^1039 - 1 — that is 307 digits long." The lead researcher believes "the writing is on the wall" for 1024-bit encryption. "Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to a non-special hard-to factor number (155 digits). I won't make predictions, but let's just say it might be a good idea to stay tuned."

8 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What are they? by jfengel · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hang on, I'm working on it. I'll get back to you.

  2. Re:What are they? by brunascle · · Score: 5, Funny

    for the love of god, please tell me you got those numbers from the results of the project

  3. Re:Why Does Encryption Need to "Scramble" Informat by goddidit · · Score: 5, Funny

    http://xkcd.com/c257.html
    Navajo code is pretty easy to crack.

    --
    This .sig is exactly 120 characters long.
  4. Re:What are they? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hey, that's the same combination I have on my luggage!

  5. Re:What are they? by sanimalp · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, he just works for the NSA.

  6. Re:Next step: FPGA cracking by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is that before or after looking at the machine? ;-)

    (forgive me, I love quantum-related jokes... ^_~) Yes.

    (forgive me, I love logic-related jokes ... :-))
    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  7. Re:How many people have the computing power ... by Abcd1234 · · Score: 5, Funny

    in fact you have about a 1 in 300 chance of pulling 1024-bit prime out of your ass

    Wow, now *that* is a cool trick!

  8. Re:How many people have the computing power ... by rpresser · · Score: 5, Funny

    Perhaps you should see the Prime Number Shitting Bear.

    Originally at http://www.primenumbershittingbear.com/ but that's long dead, so I dug it out of the Wayback Machine and put it up at http://rpresser.googlepages.com/primenumbershittin gbear.html . Enjoy.