RSA-640 Factored
A team at the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security has factored a 193-digit number. (Note that this is not a record; in May a 200-digit number was factored. But there’s a cash prize associated with this one.)
The links do a good job explaining the news and giving context.
Jarrod • November 9, 2005 11:57 AM
How well do these kinds of results scale? If an 80-Opteron cluster can do this kind of thing in five months, can something the power of Blue Gene/L do this kind of factoring in a few hours or even minutes? If so, how does this play into the abilities of large entities to break more common encryption routines?