Security Group Seminar, 8th June 1994

Speaker:
Paul Leyland, University of Oxford

Date:
Wednesday 8th June 1994 at 4.15pm

Place:
Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge

Title:
FACTORING RSA-129

In August 1977, Scientific American published a description of the newly-invented RSA public key cryptosystem. The inventors, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, offered a $100 prize to the first person or group to break an implementation by factoring a 129-digit integer.

In this talk, I will describe how RSA-129 was factored by a collaboration of hundreds of workers spread around the world. I will concentrate mostly on the resource-management and organizational problems (rather than the number theory) behind what is probably the largest single computation ever performed.


Security Group Seminar, 8th June 1994 / Mark.Lomas@cl.cam.ac.uk