RSA-576 Factorization Officially Announced

product byproduct writes "RSA Security finally has a news item about the December 2003 factorization of RSA-576. (See earlier Slashdot coverage). We now know what the computational cost was: the 174-digit number was factored "using approximately 100 workstations in a little more than three months"."

The advantage of one way encryption...

[MosesJones]

I encrypt everything on my hard-drive using one-way compact encryption, it only cost me $100 and converts every file into 0 bytes that can't be de-crypted by anyone... not even me. Now THAT is proper security.

I previously used 2^(10e20) bit encryption which would have taken several universes to crack. Unfortunately it took one earth life to encrypt a 1 Mb file so I had to revert to the super-secure method above.

And Yes I do have a tin-foil hat... why do you ask ? Oh and the application that does the one way encryption. Well I work on Windows but I get this Unix utility called Cygwin and the guy sold me a program that does the encryption. I had a look at what was in encrypt.sh and what it says is

cat /dev/null > $1

Amazing how simple UNIX makes encryption... but then I use Windows so its all beyond me.

40 Licks

[thpdg]

It begs the question, how many workstations, for how many months, would it take to find out
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
I'm afraid the world will never know.

Re:40 Licks

[Anonymous Coward]

Theh-Ree.

Why waste all the CPU power?

[tangent3]

There's a far easier [slashdot.org] way to crack the the key