History of Integer Factoring

Principal Investigator: Samuel Wagstaff

The well known Rivest-Shamir-Adleman public-key cipher could be broken if one counld factor large integers easily. The difficulty of factoring integers arises in several other problems in information security such as insuring that discrete logarithm problems are difficult, RSA signatures, zero-knowledge proofs and secure random number generation.  This work traces the history of the factoring problem over thaty past 100 years.

Keywords: Factoring integers