GoKawiilCognition's Devin AI agents factor RSA-260, setting new integer factorization record
Researcher Eric Lu and Cognition's Devin AI coding agents built a new GPU-based lattice sieving tool and used it to factor RSA-260, a 260-digit number, beating the previous RSA Factoring Challenge record of RSA-250 set in 2020. The team says the approach runs factoring workloads at roughly 10 times lower cost than prior public methods.
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The result suggests that well-resourced organizations such as hyperscalers or frontier AI labs could now factor RSA-1024 keys for around $30 million each, and potentially much less with further optimization, sharpening concerns about the security of older cryptographic deployments. However, RSA-2048, the current standard, remains about a billion times harder to break and is not meaningfully threatened by this advance, meaning widespread encryption remains safe for now.
- AI coding agents (Devin) helped build a new state-of-the-art GPU lattice sieving tool for integer factorization.
- The team factored RSA-260, surpassing the 2020 record of RSA-250, at 10x lower cost than prior methods.
- RSA-1024 could plausibly be factored for about $30 million by well-funded actors, but RSA-2048 remains secure and unaffected.
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Published there as: “Factoring RSA 260”
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