The RSA Challenge

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

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:

Year	Decimal	Bits	Required
	Digits
1974	45	149	0.001
1984	71	235	0.1
1991	100	332	7
1992	110	365	75
1993	120	398	830

Year	Decimal	Bits	Estimated
	Digits
1994	129	430	5000
1996	130	433	750
1998	140	467	2000
1999	140	467	8000

Year	RSA Number	Decimal	Bits	Time To Factor
		Digits
2003	RSA-576	155	512	unknown
2005	RSA-200	200	664	75 Opteron 2.2GHz Years
2005	RSA-640	193	640	30 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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