The RSA Challenge

Main Page
Introduction
Sun Microsystems T1000
The RSA Factoring Challenge
The Constructive Approach
Evaluation Summary
Future Research
Evaluation Chronology
System Configurations
Financial Disclaimer
Postscript

© Grebyn Corp. 2006

 

The RSA Factoring Challenge was an attempt by RSA Security (the Challenge was inactivated sometime in early 2007) to both promote the research in factorization of large integers and to allay customer fears regarding the security of its technology based upon such integers by showing the difficulty of the problems and quantifying the costs of proposed attempts to solve it (in effect, to break their system).

The initial sets of numbers were known by the number of decimal digits in the challenge number. More recent sets of numbers are known by the number of binary digits (bits).

The following Lecture notes on RSA indicate these sorts of times for factoring large integers:

YearDecimalBitsRequired
Digits
1974451490.001
1984712350.1
19911003327
199211036575
1993120398830


YearDecimalBitsEstimated
Digits
19941294305000
1996130433750
19981404672000
19991404678000


YearRSA NumberDecimalBitsTime To Factor
Digits
2003RSA-576155512unknown
2005RSA-20020066475 Opteron 2.2GHz Years
2005RSA-64019364030 Opteron 2.2GHz Years


These slides furthermore follow a discussion estimating the time of a machine costing $1 billion is able to break 1024-bit within 10 billion minutes (Roughly 20000 years). A related estimate in 2002 would have a $160 million system, named SHARK capable of breaking it within one year and quotes an RSA Security estimation of a quantity of 342,000,000 500 MHz PCs with 170GB RAM taking 1 year.

These factorizations and systems utilize an approach known as the Generalized Number Field Sieve.

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