I remember when RSA129 was being done, the program you have you manually get a start location, and then email transparent any results that it got. The program that doled out areas to search would base those on what had already been mailed in. I don't know the details of how exactly that worked, however.
Not quite. The UIDs that were given out for RSA-129 had nothing to do with the search space. The reason is that RSA-129 did not search for the prime factors; it searched for quadratic residue relations. Moreover, ANY relations within the space is a valid datapoint. As a result, the UIDs ojnly told the factoring clients where to start looking for relations. You can effectively think of it as a seed to a random number generator. So long as everyone has a different seed, they will get different random numbers. Thats what the UIDs did; provided each client with a different starting point. You had to get a new UID for each run of mpqs because starting over with the same uid would re-run all the checks you've already done. Why double-run when UIDs are cheap? You see, unlike the RC4 crack, there was no relation between the UIDs and the relations returned. As the person who wrote the UID returning script, I can tell you that all it did was keep a file with the last UID given, and when an email requests came in, it would create a lock on that file, return the last UID+1 through the number of UIDs requested, and then update the file. There was no basis of the relations received. In fact, the UID responder could have been run on any machine -- it could care less about the data returned.
But, if the program could be written in such a way that it was all automatic, mailing in results and automatically (maybe via a telnet port?) getting the information about what to search, that would be most nice.
The point of runfactor was to allow you to obtain a large segment of UIDs and dole them out locally. Since there wasn't a relation between UID and data returned, then it didn't matter if some UIDs never returned. For RC4, you _have_ to search everywhere. Therefore, you would want to make runfactor an interactive program that contacted a central server whenever it wanted to get some search space. I dont think this would be very hard to write. -derek