Yes, you heard it right one of the most famous and which have been for years to encrypt the communication standards have been cracked by a bunch of scientists who took about two-and-a-half years and hundreds of general-purpose computers.
This accomplishment was reached on December 12. In my eyes it would have been very much harder to crack this kind of cryptography because it is so much calculated and so much hard to to crack…
The team managed to factor the 232-digit number that RSA held out as a representative 768-bit modulus from a now-obsolete challenge. They spent half a year using 80 processors on polynomial selection.
Sieving took almost two years and was done on "many hundreds of machines". Using a single-core 2.2GHz AMD Opteron with 2GB RAM, sieving would have taken about 1,500 years, they estimated.
The only word come in my mouth right now is WOW.
"There's indisputable evidence here that 768-bit key are not enough. It's a pretty interesting way to close out a decade."
But as a matter of fact this is not the end as the new RSA crypto, which would be coming soon, is 1024 – Bit which would be much more harder to crack then all the previous one’s .
"If we are optimistic, it may be possible to factor a 1024-bit RSA modulus within the next decade by means of an academic effort on the same limited scale as the effort presented here," authors of the research wrote.
"From a practical security point of view this is not a big deal, given that standards recommend phasing out such moduli by the end of the year 2010."
So, its kinda like a win win for the scientists but not for the general purpose hackers as they cant be used until we get that amount of hardware to use and hence to crack that 768-bit crypto.
"It's an important milestone," said Benjamin Jun, vice president of technology at security consultancy Cryptography Research.
We have the research paper just for you guys, its all like maths thing if you want to read you can or you can download it too.
Happy Hacking @hackerthedude
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