RSA modulus record

[Victor Duchovni]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 09:01:51PM +0200, Weger, B.M.M. de wrote:

> There's a new biggest known RSA modulus.
> It is (in hexadecimal notation):
> 
> FF...(total of 9289166 F's)...FFDFF...(total of 1488985
> F's)...FF800...(total of 9289165 0's)...001
> 
> It is guaranteed to be the product of two different large primes, 

Are the primes actually known, or just "guaranteed to exist"?

> and it has more than 80 million bits. Impressive security...

In what sense is this "impressive security"?

    - Impressive 10 MB wide RSA signatures?
    - Impressively long time on super-computers to verify said signatures
    - Impressively few potential users, with at most one known key pair?

This is likely real progress in computational number theory, but it is
not clear how it is an advance in "security".

-- 
	Viktor.

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