Comment by madars

9 hours 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.

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madars

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whizzter  4 hours ago

10 days of 2048 GPU's.

Back of the envelope.. 1024 bit keys with recordings of not too old data can probably be found (MS only deprecated them in 2024 even if they planned on it in 2013)

How long would it take for NSA to crack them if they had say the equivalent of a million GPU's? (either GPU's or crypto tuned ASICs)

  • ErroneousBosh  3 hours ago

    > How long would it take for NSA to crack them if they had say the equivalent of a million GPU's? (either GPU's or crypto tuned ASICs)

    Something I've often wondered is where the curve between "shit encryption / nation state cracking" crosses.

    How much CPU would you need to be Annoyingly Difficult to crack?

    I reckon with elliptic curves you could be quite annoying within about a minute on a 1980s-level CPU, to the extent that you could send a fairly ephemeral message quite quickly that would take disproportionately long to crack. Certainly long enough for the thing you have communicated to be no longer worth the effort to know.

    You could probably do 256-bit Curve25519 key generation in under ten minutes on an Apple II or Commodore 64, because the 6502's maths is terribly limited, but something like the Tandy Color or Dragon 32 with its 6809 processor (or hey why not the Ensoniq Mirage sampler?) could do that in probably a minute or so because it has a MUL opcode that's quite fast.

    I reckon that would keep even a fairly interested nation state chewing away long after your message had been read, understood, and acted upon.