[Geek] RSA modulus record

[furrbear]

There's a new biggest known RSA modulus. It is (in hexadecimal notation):

FF...(total of 9289166 F's)...FFDFF...(total of 1488985 F's)...FF800...(total of 9289165 0's)...001

It is guaranteed to be the product of two different large primes, and it has more than 80 million bits. Impressive security...

Comments

[sultmhoor.livejournal.com]

HEY HOW DID YOU GUESS MY PRIVATE GPG KEY

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

Uh huh *eye roll* 16K bit RSA keys are slow enough but 80M-bit?

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

I bet I can factor it out. Looks quite a lot like the product of two Mersennes, and heaven knows there are easy ways to do that. :)

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

Did you catch that message on GnuPG-Users a few months ago where a guy was arguing that GnuPG should allow everything that's legal under RFC4880, and when I pointed out RFC4880 allows for terabit keys, actually advocated GnuPG supporting them? :)

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

LOL That must have been in one of those threads that got so tedious I developed MEGO and just kept marking the entire thread 'read'.

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

That would be a coup.

Victor Duchovni commented on [Cryptography]:

> > It is guaranteed to be the product of two different large primes,

Are the primes actually known, or just "guaranteed to exist"?

> > and it has more than 80 million bits. Impressive security...

In what sense is this "impressive security"?

- Impressive 10 MB wide RSA signatures?
- Impressively long time on super-computers to verify said signatures
- Impressively few potential users, with at most one known key pair?

This is likely real progress in computational number theory, but it is
not clear how it is an advance in "security".