RSA-768 factored
Posted on January 13, 2010
A team of researchers of several institutes has been able to factor a RSA-768 number by using the number field sieve. This is a known technique; the contribution of the research is the size of the number factored (786 bits; 232 digits). They conclude that "at this point factoring a 1024-bit RSA modulus looks more than five times easier than a 768-bit RSA modulus looked back in 1999, when we achieved the first public factorization of a 512-bit RSA modulus. Nevertheless, a 1024-bit RSA modulus is still about one thousand times harder to factor than a 768-bit one. If we are optimistic, it may be possible to factor a 1024-bit RSA modulus within the next decade by means of an academic effort on the same limited scale as the effort presented here."
http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/006.pdf