AI engineer breaks part of RSA encryption protocol by hand (www.scientificamerican.com)

In a notable achievement, AI engineer Eric Lu from the startup Cognition has factored RSA-260, a 260-digit number that is part of a decades-old encryption challenge. By posting a 130-digit divisor on X (formerly Twitter), Lu revealed that he successfully divided RSA-260, marking the largest RSA number to be factored. This is significant as RSA encryption underpins much of modern digital security, and any advances in breaking these numbers raise concerns about the safety of online transactions and communications. Although Lu's method remains somewhat mysterious and may have involved manual calculations with computer assistance, he emphasized the non-AI nature of his work, which underscores a shift from recent successes often attributed to AI-driven techniques. Factoring RSA-260 is seen as a labor-intensive process, reportedly taking around seven months. Despite the breakthrough, experts like Emmanuele Thomé point out that significant RSA encryption utilizing larger primes remains secure, as current methods focus more on optimizing quantum computing for future threats rather than traditional factorization techniques. For now, Lu's accomplishment is a remarkable curiosity within the AI/ML community rather than an immediate risk to existing RSA-based systems.