Eric Lu at Cognition factored the 862-bit number into 4,900 GPU-days using an algebraic screen implementation developed and piloted with Devin, at a cost ten times lower than public methods.
The RSA-260 number — 260 decimal digits, 862 bits — has just been factored, becoming the largest number of RSA Laboratories' 1991 public challenge. The operation was conducted by Eric Lu at Cognition using a GPU implementation of the general algebraic screen (GNFS) derived from CADO-NFS, developed and operated with Devin Development Agent. The calculation mobilized approximately 4,900 GPU days.
The previous record dates from February 2020: RSA-250, or 829 bits, factored by Fabrice Boudot, Pierrick Gaudry, Aurore Guillevic, Nadia Heninger, Emmanuel Thome and Paul Zimmermann, at a price of about 2,700 heart years on Xeon Gold 6130. So far, all public records of GNFS factoring were based exclusively on processors: to effectively carry the network screening step on GPU was considered an open problem, and there was no guarantee that cost savings would survive porting. Cognition claims a cost ten times lower than previous public approaches.
What it doesn't change
The RSA-2048, standard key size today, remains about 91 billion times harder to factor than RSA-260. The only practical path to it remains a cryptographically relevant quantum calculator, which does not exist. The result mainly shifts the cost boundary: it shows that a software agent can produce and run a record level cryptanalysis implementation.
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