Special-Purpose Hardware for Factoring: the NFS Sieving Step
Adi Shamir, Eran Tromer · 2005
1 Introduction The hardness of factoring large integers drawn from appropriate distributions is a central assumption in cryptography, and underlies many public-key cryptosystems and protocols. The most efficient algorithm known for factoring large integers is the Number Field Sieve (NFS) algorithm [12]. Thus, barring theoretical breakthroughs, the security of cryptosystems such as RSA practically relies on the feasibility of the NFS algorithms for the relevant input sizes.