Cognition's Devin cracks RSA-260, a new factoring record
Factoring RSA 260
Cognition's autonomous software engineer, Devin, factored RSA-260, a 260-digit number, setting a new public record for the RSA Factoring Challenge. The team built the world's fastest GPU lattice siever, cutting factoring costs by 10x. The project cost about $400k in GPU time, and the authors estimate RSA-1024 could be factored for around $30 million, though RSA-2048 remains secure. This work highlights the potential of AI agents in computational mathematics.
The barrier to entry for cryptanalytic work, other computational mathematics more broadly, and likely most large-scale scientific computing research, is far lower than it used to be.
- herf
One problem is that the core-years for RSA-250 were in 2017 Skylake Xeon single core terms.
If you can rent a dedicated 96-core Epyc for $1/hour (cheap dedicated host), the combination of IPC improvements (>2x) and core count make 7,010 "skylake core-years" cost only $175k, not $5M. On-demand cloud servers (which cost more than $1, maybe $5/hour) probably make the GPU cheaper, but it's closer than the author says.
- Retr0id
I think this is the first time an "I made an agent swarm do something" blog post was actually written by a human, what a breath of fresh air.
- big_toast
"I estimate that this factorization cost about 4,900 GPU-days, or 13.5 GPU-years, which is about $400k at current market prices"
"factorization ran at no marginal cost on spare or fragmented compute that couldn’t be used for other purposes"
Interesting use of stranded compute.