George C. Dimitriou

Researchers of the Cryptology and Information Security group of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam with partners from Germany (BSI and Bonn University), France (INRIA Nancy), Japan (NTT) and Switzerland (EPFL) have broken a 768-bit RSA key by finding its prime factors. This new record demonstrates the vulnerability of 768-bit RSA keys.

The first 512-bit RSA key was broken in 1999, in 2005 followed by the first 663-bit key. Extrapolating this trend, it is reasonable to expect that 1024-bit keys will exhibit a similar degree of vulnerability within the next decade as 768-bit keys do now.
The 768-bit factored key is an integer of 232 digits. During a timeframe of 2.5 years many thousands of CPUs on a large number of different locations were deployed to break this key. The total amount of computing power used is equivalent to 1700 2.2 GHz CPUs during one year.

Technical summary:
https://documents.epfl.ch/users/l/le/lenstra/public/papers/rsa768.txt
Preprint paper:
http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/006.pdf

The January issue of Technology Review features an important article discussing whether cloud computing is secure enough for broad public use. “Security in the Ether,” by David Talbot, brings to light some of the serious technology concerns from cloud based applications including Gmail, Twitter and Facebook.

A  Harvard Medical School study that looked at some of the U.S “most wired” hospital facilities found that computerization of those facilities hasn’t saved them any money or improved administrative efficiency.

The recently released study evaluated data on 4,000 hospitals in the U.S over a four-year period and found that the immense cost of installing and running hospital IT systems is greater than any expected cost savings. And much of the software being written for use in clinics is aimed at administrators, not doctors, nurses and lab workers.

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Every year, the InfoWorld 100 Awards celebrate 100 IT organizations that have implemented and integrated technologies in innovative ways in pursuit of concrete business goals. These 100 real-world projects stand as proof that striking a new path in IT can reap deep organizational rewards.

Microsoft has released the first snapshot of the Barrelfish operating system, an OS written specifically for multicore environments.

The Barrelfish team, a group of researchers from Microsoft Research Cambridge and the technology university ETH Zurich, says it is “motivated by two closely related trends in hardware design: first, the rapidly growing number of cores, which leads to a scalability challenge, and second, the increasing diversity in computer hardware, requiring the OS to manage and exploit heterogeneous hardware resources.”

Early rumors are that the OS will be open source and free. This first snapshot release of the code is under a copyright held by ETH Zurich and Microsoft. The full research paper is available here.

Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing. Last Thursday the Prime Minister has released a statement , recognizing the “appalling” way he was treated for being gay.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for gross indecency after admitting a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

Alan Turing is most famous for his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during WWII, helping to create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines. However, he also made significant contributions to the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and computing.

In 1936 he established the conceptual and philosophical basis for the rise of computers in a seminal paper called On Computable Numbers, while in 1950 he devised a test to measure the intelligence of a machine. Today it is known as the Turing Test.

Pi, Greek letter (π ) , is the symbol of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th.

With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 1 trillion digits past the decimal. Pi is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. The symbol for pi was first used in 1706 by William Jones, but was popular after it was adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737. Learn More …