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Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA!) posed RSA-129 in August 1977 Scientific American, predicting 40 quadrillion years as a solution time
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Actual time to crack RSA-129 was about eight months on the Internet (April 1994)
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A nice illustration of importance of algorithm improvements as well as VLSI based compute performance improvements!
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Still, many sites still use keys as small as 512 bits long (155 decimal digits) to protect enormous amounts of code and data
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Using the latest factoring technology it will only take a few tera-op months to factor a 512 binary bit number!
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