I don't think it would need to be a virus (which is incredibly difficult to write).  I'm sure a lot of people in this community as well as Cemetech, UTI and other forums would be willing to donate some of their cycles for it and a news article on ticalc would draw a lot more participants.  The bigger question is is there anyone who actually cares enough to write the software required to do this?  That would take a lot of time, unless one already exists, in which case we'd just need to borrow someone's server.

I am against the virus idea. I think it's even illegal since it's kinda malicious in some ways to infect other ppl computers against their will. It would be better if someone wrote a program that people install only if they wish, to help cracking the key.

willrandship, your idea is probably already used in the wild, just not applied to numbers this size

* factoring RSA-768 took than two years of highly coordinated effort on several clusters totaling hundreds of computers (and even more processor cores). The effort was led by top researchers of the integer factoring field, who used unpublished algorithms that are better than the published ones (ggnfs, cado-nfs, msieve). And sieving integers that large takes an awful lot of memory.
* factoring 1024-bit integers by GNFS (i.e. integers without special mathematical properties) is at least a thousand of times harder than factoring 768-bit integers.

Has a Fermat attack been tried on the Nspire and Nspire CAS keys, BTW ? It's extremely unlikely that it would yield the factors (the 512-bit keys wouldn't have fallen to it, the factors were too different from each other), but we never know.

Well, every bit you add doubles the difficulty, so 1024 is 2^256 harder than 768. That's a lot more than 1000. Not very easy at all.....

I was thinking, if you assign computers to do so many numbers, randomly within a certain bit range, it might go faster, so:

(increments of 40 example)
Server:
0-40 Unsolved
41-80 Solved, no answer
81-120 In process by 12.60.2.255
121-160 Unsolved

When a computer finishes its portion, it receives a random other portion to solve. Hopefully, several computers doing this all at the same time should hopefully hit the solution eventually, and the server sends the message to all the rest, spreading the key instantly to (hopefully) thousands of people!

By a fermat attack, are you referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_factorization_method?

I'd be willing to write it if I knew how a little better. Unfortunately, my best programming language is still TI-Basic I have lots of time on my hands for this kind of thing.

Yes, I know 40 numbers is nothing. It was just an example. It would probably be maybe 30-minute segments, not too long or they get interrupted before they finish when you turn off your computer.

brute forcing the key doesn't require much memory. Check that perl script's memory usage, and it's slim to none. But yes, the virus portion was a bad idea.


I had one other idea: Where exactly is this code stored? Is there any way we could replace it with a different key, that we know? That way, you couldn't have the nspire OS (which sucks anyways ) but you could have another OS, maybe similar to KnightOS, or moonshell (flashcart menu for DS) based.

Edit: repitition fix. Sorry about that.

Actually, I had planned on doing this a long time ago, but there was a hiccup in the program and it wasn't factoring it right. It was basically just a C port of the perl algorithm used on the hackspire site(link)  with some minor changes to allow for already checked keys and an update routine to shoot of to the server ever once and awhile. There was a problem in it though, for some reason the library I was using or something just kinda broke while trying to work with these numbers . I also tried a C# library I found on the web, it might have actually just been a .NET binding of the C library but it's been awhile ago so I'm not sure.

You could just modify the perl script instead of porting it, but I wasn't(and still am not) able to write perl, but it probably wouldn't be too hard. I had original decided to port it since a C derivative would have been faster(being compiled and not interpreted) and I would understand the coding more than the perl script since I have been working with it for much longer.

ease to use would be the best solution. Trust me, I hate when I download a software and despite reading the instructions, it's still a major pain to use, or when they don't even provide binaries with the download and force you to compile the whole thing. It generally turns me away. I am sure it's the same with several other people. If it's easy to use, more people will be interested in running it. Look at how many BASIC programmers there are in the TI community compared to ASM.

Also, it would be nice if not done already if such software continued where they left off when the computer shuts down, for example. We never know when a power outage could happen.

Oh ok. Doesn't sound too bad then. I was worried it was only saving once you manually close the software or something. That would have sucked.