Eric Cordian[SMTP:emc@artifact.psychedelic.net] wrote:

Is anyone even working on factoring any more? How long has it been since the last RSA Challenge number was factored? Seems like aeons.

RSA-160 was factored only a month ago. This is a 530 bit number. The effort appears comparable to that for the previous 512-bit challenge (much quicker due to advances in hardware over the intervening four years). RSA-160 is one of the old series of challenges, which carried piddling prizes, and were dropped by RSA a few years ago. As a result, Franke's team did not receive a prize from RSA. The newer challenges (see http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenges/) carry more substantial prizes, ranging from $10,000 (RSA-576) to $200,000 (RSA-2048). Note that the labling has changed - the old series denoted challenges by the number of digits in the decimal representation of the moduli. The new series uses the number of binary bits. So, old RSA-160 would be about equivalent to new RSA-530. Peter Trei ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- http://www.loria.fr/~zimmerma/records/rsa160