TIFA

0.1.0(devel:20110617)

About the TIFA library

TIFA is an acronym standing for "Tools for Integer FActorisation". As its (utterly unoriginal) name implies TIFA is a open source library for composite integer factorization. Its goal is to provide portable and reasonably fast implementations for several algorithms, with a particular emphasis on the factorization of small to medium-sized composites, say from 40 bits to about 200 bits.

Although it obviously won't break any record by itself, TIFA may be a good companion to more ambitious factorization attempts such as a distributed implementation of the Number Field Sieve, where it could be used to factor the numerous smaller-sized by-products.

License

Copyright (C) 2011 CNRS - Ecole Polytechnique - INRIA.

This file is part of TIFA.

TIFA is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

TIFA is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

Content of the TIFA package

Actually, TIFA is a little bit more than a library per se. The TIFA package supplies:

• a C99 library providing implementations for the following factorization algorithms:
  • CFRAC (Continued FRACtion factorization)
  • ECM (Elliptic Curve Method)
  • Fermat (McKee's "fast" variant of Fermat's algorithm)
  • SIQS (Self-Initializing Quadratic Sieve)
  • SQUFOF (SQUare FOrm Factorization)
• a set of stand-alone factorization programs for each algorithm implemented:
  • cfrac_program
  • ecm_program
  • fermat_program
  • siqs_program
  • squfof_program
• a set of Perl 5 scripts wrappers and launchers;
• a basic benchmarking framework written in Perl 5 used to assess the performance of TIFA's implementations.

Documentation

A complete user's guide is in preparation.

In the interim, the best source of documentation (apart from this Doxygen documentation generated during the build process) is the included (infamous) readme.txt file in the readme directory.

Also worth a look is the (unfortunately not empty) issues.txt file.