Arjen Lenstra posted an article in sci.crypt earlier today reporting on the factorization of a 119 digit number using the General Number Field Sieve. This is a new record factorization for the algorithm, surpassing the 116 digit number factored in July of this year. I would encourage anyone interested in factoring to read the article, which I will not waste bandwidth by quoting here. A few of the more interesting points follow. Lenstra estimates that GNFS would have factored RSA-129 in approximately one-quarter of the time employed by the QS algorithm used for that task a while back. 100,001 primes were used for the rational factor base. 360,001 were used for the algebraic factor base. Sieving took aproximately 250 MIPS years. Selection of the polynomial took three days on a DEC 3000. The factorization was found on the third dependency. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $