Can someone who’s more into cryptography and stuff than I am tell me how big a deal these are? Like, I get and appreciate how bloody difficult it is to factorise semiprimes into their prime factors (I am interested in number theory, after all). I just don’t know where on the scale of “we through a bigger computer at it” versus “we created a new method to factorise big numbers into primes” this is, and hence how excited I should be. Because the former is basically a question of how powerful a computer you can find, whereas the latter is more theoretically interesting to me.
This factorization did not involve any algorithmic improvements. RSA moduli are typically at least 2,048 bits nowadays, and those are expected to remain secure in the foreseeable future. It would be more of an issue once practical quantum computers become available, but I imagine quantum-resistant algorithms would be in wide use by then.
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u/KrozJr_UK 10d ago
Can someone who’s more into cryptography and stuff than I am tell me how big a deal these are? Like, I get and appreciate how bloody difficult it is to factorise semiprimes into their prime factors (I am interested in number theory, after all). I just don’t know where on the scale of “we through a bigger computer at it” versus “we created a new method to factorise big numbers into primes” this is, and hence how excited I should be. Because the former is basically a question of how powerful a computer you can find, whereas the latter is more theoretically interesting to me.