RSA-896
- ID
- 26558
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 20 Sep 2026, 10:19 AM
- Fetched
- 22 Sep 2026, 1:13 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://saweis.net/posts/rsa-896.html
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.5
- Created
- 22 Sep 2026, 2:21 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnerssaas_founders
What happened
Stephen A. Weis claims to have factored RSA-896, a 270-digit (896-bit) RSA Factoring Challenge number, using Claude on September 19, 2026. The post provides the two prime factors p and q, which can be verified by multiplication. No methodology, prompt details, or independent verification is described in the post itself.
Why it matters
If verified, this means an AI assistant factored an RSA challenge number that has stood unsolved for roughly two decades, implying 896-bit RSA keys are no longer safe. Developers and SaaS founders still using sub-1024-bit RSA (or even 1024-bit) should treat this as a trigger to audit key sizes and accelerate migration to at least 2048-bit RSA or elliptic-curve cryptography. The lack of methodology in the post means the result needs independent verification before acting on it.
Discussion angle
Can we verify the factorization live by multiplying p × q in the call, and what does it mean for AI-assisted cryptanalysis if a frontier model can produce factorizations that have eluded distributed computing efforts for years?