Factoring RSA 260

dang

Recent and related: RSA-260 Factorized - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49546284 - Sept 2026 (77 comments) Normally we'd downweight a follow-up [1] but this is a good article and arguably adds SNI [2] in its own right. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

rao-v

Devin … now that’s a name I’ve not hear in a long time

Retr0id

I think this is the first time an "I made an agent swarm do something" blog post was actually written by a human, what a breath of fresh air.

bleepblap

Who is Devin and why do they listen to the author?

mkmk

This is so well written as to be refreshing

big_toast

"I estimate that this factorization cost about 4,900 GPU-days, or 13.5 GPU-years, which is about $400k at current market prices" "factorization ran at no marginal cost on spare or fragmented compute that couldn’t be used for other purposes" Interesting use of stranded compute.

herf

One problem is that the core-years for RSA-250 were in 2017 Skylake Xeon single core terms. If you can rent a dedicated 96-core Epyc for $1/hour (cheap dedicated host), the combination of IPC improvements (>2x) and core count make 7,010 "skylake core-years" cost only $175k, not $5M. On-demand cloud servers (which cost more than $1, maybe $5/hour) probably make the GPU cheaper, but it's closer than the author says.