Microsoft uses a 512 bit key for their e-commerce. That is pretty funny because an academic research group, headed by CWI Amsterdam has factorised RSA-155 Which is a 512bit number too. If the public key is RSA modulus of a factorised we can calculate the secret key easily. And because we are innovative young people we want to use the best hardware (AMD Athlon) and the best operating system (Linux) to do the job. Factorisation means two steps. The first step can be distributed very easily and took much less than our successful DES cracking actions. The second step needs between 2 and 3 GB main memory. The new Linux kernel will support 4 GB. So we want to discuss in this workshop if it is possible to support Microsoft distributed secret key''management''(see''_NSAKEY backup key''). http://www.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/ ~ rweis/ccc1999 /