Re: RSA Challenges

Scott Contini wrote:

On May 21, 9:54 pm, Pubkeybreaker <pubkeybrea...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
RSA Labs has stopped all of its cryptographic challenges.

I can guess why.

Maybe they got nervous from this announcement:
http://www.crypto-world.com/announcements/m1039.txt


Why? Mr. Kleinjung explicitly stated that this is the SNFS and the special structure of being a factor of a Mersenne prime has heavily exploited. Applying the same method for totally random composites, they could merely factor about 700 binary digits, that's why their next target is RSA-704.

Beside that, RSA closed their challenge *some days before* this announcement.
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