A Mighty Number Falls

An international team has broken a long-standing record in an impressive feat of calculation. On March 6, computer clusters from three institutions (the EPFL, the University of Bonn, and NTT in Japan) reached the end of eleven months of strenuous calculation, churning out the prime factors of a well-known, hard-to-factor number — 2^1039 – 1 — that is 307 digits long.

So if you just so happen to be using 1024-bit encryption and believe you are the target of a super computer, it’s probably a good idea to change your password every nine months.

Source: Slashdot