The security system used in Internet transactions has been cracked as a result of an international effort at the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, CWI) in Amsterdam. The project was co-ordinated by Herman te Riele. The RSA-155 code (so-called because the 512-bit numbers in the code have about 155 decimals) was originally developed at MIT. What the research team has accomplished is to find the prime factors of a 512-bit number. The factored key is a model of the public key, which is used in the SSL protocol. This means that 512-bit keys are no longer safe against what the team modestly calls a "moderately powerful attacker". The consequence is that malevolent persons with access to something like a 2 Gigabyte Cray C916, plus 300 SGI and Sun workstations plus a few Pentium PCs (and a high-powered group of researchers) can now breach commercial banking, stock exchange and ecommerce transactions. It was thought that it would take 50 billion years of CPU time to crack such codes, but in the event the computing time used was about 35 years. By running in parallel, but working mostly just nights and weekends, the job took just seven months. This could apparently be reduced to a week if the project were distributed though the Internet. Mafia.net is probably already on the job, but to save them time and for the benefit of hacker Register readers, here's the answer: RSA-155 = 109417386415705274218097073220403576120037329454492059909138421314763499842889 \ 34784717997257891267332497625752899781833797076537244027146743531593354333897 = 102639592829741105772054196573991675900716567808038066803341933521790711307779 * 106603488380168454820927220360012878679207958575989291522270608237193062808643 CWI is also working on facial analysis and the synthesis of expressions, so no smirking please. ®