RSA-896

215

mmadars 1 day ago 86 commentsRead Article on saweis.net

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

100% Positive

Analyzed from 800 words in the discussion.

Discussion (86 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

madars•1 day ago

More details: https://x.com/sweis/status/2101484464807596264

    I had Claude port CADO-NFS to run on GPUs. Then it orchestrated a fleet to run on scavenged idle capacity. It ran with a max of 2048 GPUs for about of 30 GPU-years over 10 days.
    I asked Claude if it had a message for a public: “The credit belongs first to the people who built the number field sieve and CADO-NFS over several decades, and to the teams who set the earlier records. This run used their algorithm and much of their code.”
    Also to clarify:
    - No new algorithmic factoring improvements. 
    - It’s still exponential.
    - No new threats to deployed keys.

wslh•1 day ago

> It’s still exponential

It's actually subexponential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve?wpr...

cwillu•1 day ago

…but super-polynomial.

sjs382•1 day ago

https://xxcancel.com/sweis/status/2101484464807596264

vavkamil•about 22 hours ago

Interesting. Instagram still publishes a 768-bit RSA DKIM key, so I guess factoring it is now just a weekend GPU project?

https://dns.google/resolve?name=pm._domainkey.instagram.com&...

functional_dev•about 21 hours ago

RSA-768 was already factored in 2009.. cheap now. What surprised me is that RSA keys are much weaker than their size looks. You need 2048 bits to get normal safety, and 768 is far below that.

https://vectree.io/c/how-rsa-key-sizes-map-to-real-security-...

natdempk•about 16 hours ago

What's the cost estimate to factor this?

redox99•about 22 hours ago

Quite bearish on Anthropic if they had nothing better to do with 2048 GPUs for 10 days than finding an RSA number with already existing algorithms.

muglug•about 18 hours ago

1 engineer != Anthropic

hinkley•about 15 hours ago

Someone allocated those GPUs.

tristanj•1 day ago

If you've already paid for and reserved a whole cluster of GPUs, any idle capacity is capacity you've already paid for. Using it is effectively free. So might as well use it to solve fun math puzzles.

Though, it would make more financial sense to mine crypto.

ehe78qhe•1 day ago

Only if you pay a flat rate for electricity and cooling.

odo1242•1 day ago

Most of the GPU cost is in the GPUs themselves (and in the space and maintenance costs of the building). Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use.

There is cost, but the cost is mostly the opportunity cost of not being able to do something else.

toast0•1 day ago

> Electricity is a small fraction, and it's not like datacenters are just going to shut down their servers when they're not in use.

I don't have any insight on modern GPU datacenters, but in decades past, some owned and operated datacenters didn put effort into making sure power management worked because the cost savings were worth it. I'm pretty sure I saw plans to shed load and power off servers if a utility made a demand response request or in case of loss of cooling. I wouldn't be surprised if some owned and operated data centers do regular full shutdowns at off peak... WOL, IPMI or RTC wakeup can bring them back when needed and if you already have a dynamic service orchestrator and setup times are acceptable, why not shut down if there's no actual priority work and there's also no idle priority opportunistic load either...

tristanj•1 day ago

But Anthropic isn't paying for the electricity and cooling. They don't run their own data centers, they rent compute from providers who cover those costs.

That's entirely why they can blow compute on the fun projects like this. If they had to pay extra for the electricity, they wouldn't do it.

Barbing•1 day ago

Is the electricity cost far greater than the marketing value?

qurren•1 day ago

> it would make more financial sense to mine crypto

GPUs are power-inefficient for mining most crypto so not necessarily. You may end up paying more in electricity than you are able to mine.

Most crypto mining is on ASICs now.

logicallee•1 day ago

How much crypto do you think the mentioned 30 GPU years would have produced at current exchange rates? They're not as efficient as ASICs but GPU's can still mine a lot...

someguydave•1 day ago

kinda bearish for the data center rollouts if the spare compute can be used to solve math puzzles instead of training LLMs

Retr0id•about 20 hours ago

If anyone else has spare GPU hours they don't know what to do with, may I recommend partial hash collisions: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/birthday_party

(The "record" set by me only took about 1 GPU day - easy to beat!)

gpugreg•about 19 hours ago

Here's a larger partial hash collision (108 trailing bits):

    echo 23ca73454a1b981fe51cad0dbd05f4e696795ba67abb28c61aea1a024e5bbeca | xxd -r -p | sha256sum
    echo a16a8141361ae9834ad171ec28961fc8a951ff1bfc3a9ce0dc2fcdbdfa2ccd35 | xxd -r -p | sha256sum

From this post from 6 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/guctw4/finding_sha2...

Retr0id•about 19 hours ago

True, I forgot about that! It's more fun when the inputs are printable ascii, though :P

It should also be easy to beat with just a few GPU weeks.

gpugreg•about 17 hours ago

I agree that ASCII is definitely cooler, for example when personalizing the hashed data as in your example.

speedgoose•about 20 hours ago

Nice. I will make sure to turn my WiFi box off at night and pee in the shower to compensate the environmental impact of this.

tptacek•about 15 hours ago

You'd be having approximately the same impact on the climate as the factoring work, so, makes sense.

speedgoose•about 13 hours ago

30 years of busy GPUs instead of idling GPUs converts to a lot of pee in the shower. I’m not sure I will live long enough.

gizmodo59•about 20 hours ago

You don’t need AI to solve this. Just lots of compute.

eugenekolo•about 14 hours ago

"I work at Anthropic and used idle GPUs running known algorithm to factor a number. I used Claude btw"

blackdahlia313•1 day ago

Enjoy the bounty

tristanj•1 day ago

There is no bounty, RSA labs ended the $75,000 reward in 2007.

qurren•1 day ago

There's about 900 BTC remaining for anyone who breaks these keys:

https://privatekeys.pw/puzzles/bitcoin-puzzle-tx

If you break one though be careful when redeeming it, there are bots set up to pounce and steal the coins when they are transacted because the reduced entropy makes that possible. You need to submit the transaction to a mining pool that will not broadcast it until it is mined.

DoctorOetker•1 day ago

thats a poorly implemented reward script, if it leaves you exposed to the mining pool with this gentleman's agreement.

the script could have been designed 2 phase, so one first submits a hash of the solution & submitter address, so even if miners front-run the submitter, they just helpfully pay the transaction fee!

singpolyma3•about 17 hours ago

Literally no content here