Factoring as a Service [chapter]

Luke Valenta, Shaanan Cohney, Alex Liao, Joshua Fried, Satya Bodduluri, Nadia Heninger
2017 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
The difficulty of integer factorization is fundamental to modern cryptographic security using RSA encryption and signatures. Although a 512-bit RSA modulus was first factored in 1999, 512-bit RSA remains surprisingly common in practice across many cryptographic protocols. Popular understanding of the difficulty of 512-bit factorization does not seem to have kept pace with developments in computing power. In this paper, we optimize the CADO-NFS and Msieve implementations of the number field
more » ... for use on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud platform, allowing a non-expert to factor 512-bit RSA public keys in under four hours for $75. We go on to survey the RSA key sizes used in popular protocols, finding hundreds or thousands of deployed 512-bit RSA keys in DNSSEC, HTTPS, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, DKIM, SSH, and PGP.
doi:10.1007/978-3-662-54970-4_19 fatcat:qi3ebvym6vdqnb4zpq3tw4r2qq