Hey, I thought you left TI as news editor.

Anyway, yes, this is very monumental. It would have taken him forever. I still want to know how he did it.

I thought I did too :) I'll still be around now and then.

I'm very impressed by Benjamin's work. I just wish we could get some technical details!

I know, he's being so secretive about it.

I just wish that someone writes a tutorial on how to fully make an os, or that brandon writes one documenting what he did with os2. If not, and if I ever figure out all of this, I will probably write one!!!

Clearly he converted a TI-83+ into some sort of quantum computing device, enabling him to crack it.

Hmm... good idea. Quantum Voyage 400, anyone? :)

I agree. The Voyage 400 is the next key to work on.

Oh... I misread the previous comment, but still, the voyage 400 should be the next key to crack. Because of its advanced computing capacity and color screen, though, it may take a while.

As I said on UTI, this took a fair amount of CPU power -- about 73 days of computation -- but it didn't really take a lot of work from me; mostly I just watched the numbers go up, and periodically started up another Msieve run.

Oh, and by the way, I don't actually think this will work for sending OSes to a stock 84+. (84+ OSes are signed using the 0A key instead. While the boot code does include key 04, it also has a bug preventing that key from being used. So I believe you can only send an 04-signed OS if you have that key in your calculator certificate.)

Ah, so it was "brute force" (although smart brute forcing) rather than something else. I never thought about how weak 512-bit RSA keys are, but clearly you shouldn't use them. ;-) Too bad we didn't just do this a year or two ago by pooling a few CPUs together...

But in any case, brilliant work!

*sigh* This makes me wish I didn't fall of out of the programming loop. I just barely understand what all was done, but it's a far fetch for me to get up and have a go at it now...

Awesome! This, along with the news about what Brandon did, suddenly made me have an extreme urge to do some TI-83+ series assembly

Good! That's the intention!

We need 4 million people willing to take part in distributed computing.

Actually, with just 73 computers equal to Ben's, the sieving could theroetically be done within a day.

The sieving, maybe, but the final processing would still take a week or so.

Okay.
And what about the 83+SE/84+/84+SE?

Funny you should ask. The 83+ SE uses the same keys as the normal 83+. But the OS signing key for the 84+ has just been factored by a distributed effort (see the link.) We're still working to find the factors of the remaining keys (OS and app signing keys for TI-73, 89, 92+, and V200.) You can help, too; see http://boinc.unsads.com/rsals/ .

TI has used the DMCA to throw C&Ds at us :(