RSA Factoring Challenge

Phillip H. Zakas pzakas at toucancapital.com
Mon Aug 6 11:46:34 PDT 2001



Is anyone working on the current RSA factoring challenge?  $10K prize for
factoring a 576-bit number; $200K for a 2048-bit number (other awards for
640, 704, 768, 896, 1024 and 1536-bit numbers.)  See this page for details:

http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenges/factoring/numbers.html

They've provided me with the C source used to generate the numbers (though
not the BSafe toolkit you need to link into the program.)  Anyone can
receive the source by asking RSA for it.  I've decided to enter by using a
factoring program which makes guesses about what the prime number factors
are (by examining the last two digits, predicting the likely like of
one/both factors, using lists of prime numbers generated by a second
algorithm, etc.)  So far, barring errors in my logic and code (always a
possibility), I've completed a little over 5% of the "likely" candidates for
the 576-bit number in a little over 2 days using a single CPU pentium
III-600 with 512MB RAM.

phillip





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list