Scientists have cracked the longest and most complex encryption key

[Tomcat]

French scientists managed to crack the longest and most complex encryption key in existence today. To do this, they used several concurrently operating clusters of computers in France, Germany and the United States, thus reducing the time required for hacking from 35 million to several thousand computing hours.

The RSA encryption algorithm (an abbreviation for the names of its creators Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) is one of the most popular forms of encryption, using multiplication to get a very large number from several simple ones. The algorithm is used in a significant number of cryptographic applications, including PGP, S / MIME, TLS / SSL, IPSEC / IKE, etc.

Emmanuel Thomé of the National Institute for Informatics and Automation Research and his colleagues were able to prime the RSA-240 key with a length of 240 decimal places or 795 bits, and they were able to calculate the discrete logarithm of the same length. The previous record for prime factorization was set in 2010. Then it was possible to crack the RSA key with a width of 768 bits or with 232 decimal places.