Factoring progress (was: RE: All trust is economics)

[Trei, Peter]

> Eric Cordian[SMTP:emc at 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

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