[ISN] Multinational team cracks crypto puzzle

[InfoSec News]

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.