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From: explorer@iastate.edu (Michael Graff)
Subject: RSA129 factoring attack -- participants needed
Message-ID: <explorer.748591928@tbird.cc.iastate.edu>
Followup-To: poster
Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
Reply-To: rsa129-info@iastate.edu
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames IA
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1993 06:12:08 GMT
Lines: 105
[ Sorry if this gets posted twice -- I seem to have botched it once ]
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
---------------------
In 1977, a 129-digit integer appeared in the pages of Scientific American.
This number, the RSA challenge modulus or RSA-129, has not yet been
successfully factored. Factoring it, a 425-bit number, would be a major
milestone in cryptography, as it would show that current technology is able to
break commonly-used RSA-cryptosystem keys within a reasonable time.
Excerpted from the RSA Factoring Challenge news:
The "RSA challenge" published in the August 1977 issue of Scientific American
(in Martin Gardner's column) is still open, and the $100 prize offer still
stands. This prize can be won by factoring the RSA modulus published there,
which is:
RSA-129 = 11438162575788886766923577997614661201021829672124236256256184
29357069352457338978305971235639587050589890751475992900268795
43541 (129 digits, checksum = 105443)
--- End of RSA Factoring Challenge news ---
As with several other recent large scale factoring projects, we are attacking
this number with a very large number of workstations independently operating
at dozens of research and corporate networks around the world. We are
soliciting volunteers to provide compute cycles to help us towards our goal.
With the permission of the authors, we are using the publicly available code
of the Lenstra/Manasse Factoring by Email project, with modifications by Paul
Leyland and Derek Atkins for RSA-129 and multiple machine types. The sieving
is distributed around the Internet, with relations transferred to a central
site by email or ftp as convenient. Combining the relations and matrix
elimination will be performed at ISU, using a combination of structured Gauss
and a MasPar dense matrix eliminator.
Each participant is provided with complete source code for the siever. You
can easily verify that the program takes no input from your machines and does
not pose a security risk. It requires only an email connection to transmit
partial results -- the software does not require communication with other
machines except for this purpose. It is easy to install, and is designed so
that it will take up no CPU cycles on your machine when interactive users or
other important processes are active. If preferred, participants can
accumulate the results locally and ftp them to the central site manually.
However, the program does require rather a lot of active virtual memory -- at
least 6.5 megabytes and the more you have the faster it runs. That said, it
runs happily on any Unix box with at least 8Mb of physical memory. It is
currently running on Suns (SunOS and Solaris), DEC (MIPS and Alpha), HP-UX,
Linux, NetBSD, 386BSD, FreeBSD, and RS6000 machines.
The project currently has around 500 workstations which are busy sieving.
However, to finish in a reasonable amount of time, this count needs to
increase greatly. We are attempting to enroll around 10,000 workstations in
this project. We estimate that we are over 5% of the way to completion at
this time.
This is a call for participants, who have workstations or MasPars at their
disposal and would like to participate in this project. All contributions
help a great deal.
There is a $100 prize associated with factoring this number. The prize, if we
win it, will be donated to the GNU project of the Free Software Foundation to
help generate more of the excellent software they currently provide.
SOURCE CODE and ID INFORMATION
------------------------------
Source code can be obtained by FTP (or using a FTP to mail gateway) from
toxicwaste.mit.edu as /pub/rsa129/MPQS.shar.Z
black.ox.ac.uk as /math/rsa129/MPQS.shar.Z
To unpack it (on a Unix system) do:
uncompress MPQS.shar.Z
sh MPQS.shar
It will unpack several files, one of which is called ``README'', which should
be consulted for building instructions, information on how to obtain a set of
IDs, and input files for this project.
If you need this via mail or have further questions, please mail a message to
the address below.
STATUS REPORTS and WORKER MAILING LIST
--------------------------------------
A mailing list for status reports and other informational mailing is
maintained. Send mail to rsa129-request@iastate.edu to be added to this list.
For more information, please mail rsa129-info@iastate.edu. We will respond
to all questions quickly.
--Michael Graff [project coordinator/programmer]
--Derek Atkins [coordinator/programmer]
--Paul Leyland [advisor/programmer]
--Daniel Ashlock [faculty advisor ISU]
--
Michael Graff <explorer@iastate.edu> Speaking for myself, not
Project Vincent Voice: (515)294-4994 for ISU or the ISUCC
Iowa State Univ Comp Center Fax: (515)294-1717
Ames, IA 50011 -=*> PGP key on pgp-public-keys@pgp.iastate.edu <*=-