Texas Instruments signing key controversy
Texas Instruments' response to a project to factorize cryptographic keys
Why this is trending
Interest in “Texas Instruments signing key controversy” spiked on Wikipedia on 2026-02-25.
Categorised under Technology, this article fits a familiar pattern. wt.cat.technology.2
At GlyphSignal we surface these trending signals every day—transforming Wikipedia’s vast pageview data into actionable insights about global curiosity.
Key Takeaways
- The Texas Instruments signing key controversy resulted from Texas Instruments' (TI) response to a project to factorize the 512-bit RSA cryptographic keys needed to write custom firmware to TI devices.
- The discovery of the private key would allow end users to flash their own operating systems onto the device without having to use any special hardware.
- 9 GHz dual-core processor.
- In response, members of the wider TI graphing calculators community (at yAronet) set up a BOINC-based distributed computing project, RSA Lattice Siever (RSALS for short), that quickly factored the other keys.
- After factoring over 400 integers, RSALS moved to RSALS-inspired NFS@home at the end of August 2012.
The Texas Instruments signing key controversy resulted from Texas Instruments' (TI) response to a project to factorize the 512-bit RSA cryptographic keys needed to write custom firmware to TI devices.
Project
In July 2009, Benjamin Moody, a United-TI forum user, published the factors of a 512-bit RSA key used to sign the TI-83+ series graphing calculator. The discovery of the private key would allow end users to flash their own operating systems onto the device without having to use any special hardware. Moody used two free software implementations of the general number field sieve, msieve and ggnfs; the computation took 73 days on a 1.9 GHz dual-core processor. This demonstrates the progress of hardware development: the factorization of the similar 512-bit RSA-155 in 1999 using the same algorithm required a large dedicated research group, 8000 MIPS-years of computing time, and a Cray C916 supercomputer.
In response, members of the wider TI graphing calculators community (at yAronet) set up a BOINC-based distributed computing project, RSA Lattice Siever (RSALS for short), that quickly factored the other keys. RSA Lattice Siever remained active for nearly three years after outliving its initial purpose, by factoring other integers for the mathematical community. After factoring over 400 integers, RSALS moved to RSALS-inspired NFS@home at the end of August 2012.
Content sourced from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0
