Factoring is an important part of Cryptography and Security, so that it makes perfect sense finding this topic here.
The unique factoring of a number makes concealment easy: if a person knows the key, so say the factors involved, they should be able to de-code the message in a relatively easy way.
We want to pass a message from one end to another during a war, and the enemy can only de-code it in reasonable time if they have our keys.
They used to give money to individuals in exchange for the factoring of a number.
From the mentioned source:
"Starting in 1991, RSA Data Security offered a set of “challenges” intended to measure the difficulty of integer factoring. The challenges consisted of a list of 41 RSA Numbers, each the product of two primes of approximately equal length, and another, larger list of Partition Numbers generated according to a recurrence.
The first five of the RSA Numbers, ranging from 100 to 140 decimal digits (330–463 bits), were factored successfully by 1999 (see [2] for details on the largest of these). An additional 512-bit (155-digit) challenge number was later added in view of the popularity of that key size in practice; it was also factored in 1999 [1].
In addition to the formal challenge numbers, an old challenge number first published in August 1977, renamed ‘RSA-129’, was factored in 1994 [1].
The Quadratic Sieve was employed for the numbers up to RSA-129, and the Number Field Sieve for the rest."
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