Chasing the Next RSA Milestone
With the recent news of RSA-896 being factored, I got curious about the overall timeline of the RSA challenge. I spent some time mapping out the bit-length of every historically solved RSA number against the date it was cracked, and fit a simple trendline to see what the road ahead actually looks like.
If we just follow the historical baseline, the curve gives us a pretty neat timeline all the way up to RSA-2048. But of course, math on a page doesn't always account for the real world. The RSA-896 record was just set in 10 days using a massive fleet of GPUs and some clever AI-assisted tooling, which shows how fast the hardware and software landscape is shifting right now.
Still, as a fun baseline, the model suggests that if current classical trends hold, the next big milestone—RSA-270 (895 bits)—could be solved around October or November of this year. It’ll be really interesting to watch and see if these new hardware leaps keep accelerating the timeline, or if the historical curve manages to hold steady!