Also not "factored", but rather a discrete logarithm can be taken. The apparent difficulty of factorization underlies some public-key systems (like RSA), while

Also not "factored", but rather a discrete logarithm can be taken. The apparent difficulty of factorization underlies some public-key systems (like RSA), while the apparent difficulty of extracting discrete logarithms underlies others (like Diffie-Hellman key exchange and DSA). This research is about the second problem.