Squeamish Ossifrage
In 1977, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, the inventors of the RSA cryptosystem, posed a challenge: decompose a 129-digit RSA modulus into its two factors, which then could be used to decrypt an enciphered message for a reward of 100 US dollars.
The challenge went unsolved until 1994, when a handful of engineers and mathematicians led a distributed computing project that leveraged 600 participants and 1600 computers to successfully factor it. Decrypted, the message was:
200805001301070903002315180419000118050019172105011309190800151919090618010705
Taking groups of two decimal digits as letters and zeroes as spaces, this decoded to THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE - and the researchers claimed their $100 prize.
Here are two similar challenges encoded in the same way using 512-bit RSA, each decoding to half of an important asset code. Maybe having more than one makes it easier?
n1=10216205725036353214956600913047891396180308069052118032164369404548589912192677175888604368553013531842394297204626804390479092691230825900566708312630593
c1=7005556756414044797070961785797056809920680863914987179883604328104657623958756696743584952638246880875144063362157043879010410309348949538929207955289468
n2=10276120130242052919344855069007171882975236014964779936717657262674213426956710210351582305279253416459147803441242445663495482077211269018512399366062689
c2=1639778389359490496893998108014412373427676624220880854950247807964185848603362993552466974411609959862409866402112947426885217167714302816783383144107227
Difficulty: ★★★★★
The challenge went unsolved until 1994, when a handful of engineers and mathematicians led a distributed computing project that leveraged 600 participants and 1600 computers to successfully factor it. Decrypted, the message was:
200805001301070903002315180419000118050019172105011309190800151919090618010705
Taking groups of two decimal digits as letters and zeroes as spaces, this decoded to THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE - and the researchers claimed their $100 prize.
Here are two similar challenges encoded in the same way using 512-bit RSA, each decoding to half of an important asset code. Maybe having more than one makes it easier?
n1=10216205725036353214956600913047891396180308069052118032164369404548589912192677175888604368553013531842394297204626804390479092691230825900566708312630593
c1=7005556756414044797070961785797056809920680863914987179883604328104657623958756696743584952638246880875144063362157043879010410309348949538929207955289468
n2=10276120130242052919344855069007171882975236014964779936717657262674213426956710210351582305279253416459147803441242445663495482077211269018512399366062689
c2=1639778389359490496893998108014412373427676624220880854950247807964185848603362993552466974411609959862409866402112947426885217167714302816783383144107227
Difficulty: ★★★★★
Comments
Post a Comment