[ISN] Multinational team cracks crypto puzzle

From: InfoSec News (isn@private)
Date: Wed Apr 28 2004 - 02:45:54 PDT

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    http://news.com.com/2100-7355-5201037.html
    
    By CNET News.com Staff 
    April 27, 2004
    
    RSA Security on Tuesday said that over three months of consistent
    effort helped a team of mathematicians from Europe and North America
    solve the company's latest encryption puzzle.
    
    The multinational team of eight experts used about 100 workstations to
    crack the code that won them a $10,000 prize.
    
    The contestants' task was to determine the two prime numbers that have
    been used to generate eight "challenge" numbers, which are central to
    RSA's 576-bit encryption code.
    
    RSA's contest is designed to help test the robustness of the lengthy
    algorithms used for electronic security. The competition is intended
    to encourage research into computational number theory and the
    practical difficulty of factoring large integers.
    
    "The information received during these challenges is a valuable
    resource to the cryptographic community and can be helpful for
    organizations in choosing appropriate cryptographic measures for a
    desired level of security," said Burt Kaliski, chief scientist and
    director at the RSA Laboratories.
    
    RSA-576 is a smaller-scale example of the types of cryptographic keys
    that are recommended for securing Internet and wireless transactions.  
    Typical keys are at least 1,024 bits (310 decimal digits); RSA-576 is
    576 bits (174 decimal digits). Larger numbers are considered to
    provide significantly greater security. The next challenge number in
    the series is RSA-640.
    
    The experts involved in the project represented two German research
    groups, the Scientific Computing Institute and the Pure Mathematics
    Institute, and one from the Netherlands, the National Research
    Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science. Number theorists from
    Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom also participated.
    
    
    
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