A 512-bit RSA cert cracked in 2 days on a consumer GPU

A researcher factored the RSA keys of a 90s-era Certificate Authority using contemporary consumer GPU hardware, completing a 512-bit factorization in roughly two days. The thread noted that most traffic of that era wasn't encrypted at all, and those that were used non-ephemeral keys, meaning retroactive decryption of intercepted traffic was theoretically possible.

The practical implication for today is limited since 512-bit RSA has been deprecated for decades. But the thread's real value was the reminder about the cost curve: factoring time halves for every bit reduction in key size. What takes two days on a GPU today will take minutes on better hardware tomorrow. The 'F' grades from SSL report tooling in the comments landed as dark comedy.

This is a useful forcing function for thinking about cryptographic debt in older internal systems. Legacy services running old TLS configurations, internal APIs with weak certificates, or any system that hasn't been touched since the early 2000s may be carrying this kind of exposure without anyone knowing.