RSA Challenge

Want to make lots of money? Here's the key (pun intended). RSA is pretty much the de-facto standard for encryption used extensively in online secure transactions. It's what ensures that the credit card number that you enter while buying an airline ticket cannot be captured by fraudulent people (well, even if they do capture it, they will not be able to make any sense out of it).

RSA primarily uses large semi-prime numbers (you can read more in this Wikipedia article). A semi-prime number is a multiple of two prime numbers.

RSA Labs is running a challenge for finding the factors of some identified semi-prime numbers. The prize for factorizing the largest of them is, hold your breath, USD 200,000. Before you bring out your calculators however, here's a quote from factorizers of a semi-prime number from the list: The effort took approximately 30 2.2GHz-Opteron-CPU years according to the submitters, over five months of calendar time.

The next semi-prime that is to be factorized is (officially referred to as RSA-704):

740375634795617128280467960974295731
425931888892312890849362326389727650
340282662768919964196251178439958943
305021275853701189680982867331732731
089309005525051168770632990723963807
86710086096962537934650563796359 (212 digits)