RSA-129

Time ago, the inventors of RSA published a challenge: they encrypted a message with their RSA algorithm and made both the encrypted message and the public key used to encrypt it, available in public. Then they offered $100 to the first person able to provide the plaintext message. This challenge is often called 'RSA-129' because the public key used was 129 digits long.

An international team accepted the challenge. So, about 1600 machines were involved into the challenge, with computing power ranging from fax machines to Cray supercomputers. They used the best factoring algorithm available. The project took about eight months, and were extimated about 5000 MIPS-years of computing time. A MIPS-year is about the amount of computing time done by a 1MIPS computer in a year. 1 MIPS means one million of instructions per second. In other words, a computer able to perform 1 MIPS has to work 5000 years to win the challenge!

More information: ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/math/rsa129/rsa129.ps.gz