A general number field sieve implementation

Abstract

The general number field sieve is the asymptotically fastest---and by far most complex---factoring algorithm known. We have implemented this algorithm, including five practical improvements: projective polynomials, the lattice sieve, the large prime variation, character columns, and the positive square root method. In this paper we describe our implementation and list some factorizations we obtained, including the record factorization of 2523 − 1.