New Record Set for Cryptographic Challenge
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:
New record set for cryptographic challenge:
An international team of computer scientists has set a new record for integer factorization, one of the most important computational problems underlying the security of nearly all public-key cryptography currently used today.
[...] To encourage research into integer factorization, the "RSA Factoring Challenges" were created in 1991. These challenges consisted of challenge integers of varying sizes, named for the number of integer digits.
The team of computer scientists from France and the United States set a new record by factoring the largest integer of this form to date, the RSA-250 cryptographic challenge. This integer is the product of two prime numbers, each with 125 decimal digits. In total, it took 2700 years of running powerful computer cores to carry out the computation, which was done on tens of thousands of machines around the world over the course of a few months.
The key broken with this record computation is smaller than keys that would typically be used in practice by modern cryptographic applications: it has 829 binary bits, where current practice dictates that RSA keys should be at least 2048 binary bits long. Researchers use these types of computations to choose key strength recommendations that will remain secure for the foreseeable future.
"Achieving computational records regularly is necessary to update cryptographic security parameters and key size recommendations," said Nadia Heninger, a professor of computer science at the University of California San Diego, and a member of the research team.
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