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RC5-64 Project Teeters At The Halfway Mark
Soft writes: "The RC5-64 statistics page indicates that 49.779% of the keyspace has been exhausted, which means that at the current rate of 0.080% per day, the halfway mark should have been reached by the weekend. Anybody want to speculate on the actual completion date, correlating with the speed plots on the other stats page, the current rate, etc.?"
RC5-64 started 3 1/2 years ago. In that time, more people have joined and computers have gotten much, much more powerful. Even if the number of participants remains steady and 100% of the keyspace has to be searched, the second half will take less than 3 1/2 years.
RC5-64 is safe today. But maybe not tomorrow.
Or as the pessimist would put it: After four years (or whatever) of intense calculations involving 300.000 computers, they have finally established the single first bit the 64 bit encryption key.
Or the optimist: They have now managed to cover an entire 63 bit keyspace, showing that a 63 bit key can be cracked, and that just a single bit remains until the goal of cracking rc5-64 is reached.
It's a good thing our world is linear rather than logarithmic, isn't it? All the bickering about half empty and half full seems pretty harmless in comparison...
What was the question again?
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Some companies have discovered the distributed computing trend and jumped on the bandwagon to get free computing power. If you want to support non-profit, open, public research, instead of closed, for-profit efforts, here are a few projects:
Seti At Home (yeah, we all knew that)
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
Protein Folding At Home
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/
Genome At Home
http://genomeathome.stanford.edu/
I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones I run.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
What absolute nonsense. It's not "news" that this level of encrpytion is safe to use. Given the algorithm used to try and brute force the key, it's always been possible to say "Ok, it would require x number of processors running for y years to break this key".
rc5-64 proves nothing but the concept of distributed computing. That aside it's nothing but an absolutely immense waste of power (Think of the additional power used by hundreds of thousands of processors running at 100% 24/7 - and no, they're not using the same amount of power just by being on. Almost all modern processors go into power saving mode when they're not being used), and a way to boast about your hardware: "Hey look! My computers do 12MKeys/s! I'm l33t!"
I know this comes off as a troll or a flame, but this subject irritates me enough as it is without people drawing false conclusions from the results.
... could we please get back to work and use all
that power on something meaningfull, such as finding mersenne primes or Optimal Golomb Rulers.
RSA wanted to prove that neither 56 bit and 64 bit encryption isn't enough and that it is possible for a small crack senstive information protected by 56 or 64 bit encryption.
It will take som time to finish the 64-bit RC5 challenge, but it can be done.
Question is should it be finished? Not in my oppinion! Sure they will win $10.000, but that's about the only positive I can see in this. Used wast amount of power and computing time in doing so, only to give RSA reason to sell 128-bit RC5 and argue that it really is secure.
Wote with your CPU power and switch to something we all can benefit from. Larger primes and OGRs are candidates, but I'm sure there are others.
Thomas S. Iversen
And this differs from a typical slashdot set of comments how?
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
This is good "news". Rougly 3½ year and only halfways. That proves that RC5-64 is fairly "safe" to use, so I can sleep well and know that people would have some really hard problems deciphering my secure data.
Distributed.net is good for everybodys privacy.
Each of the remaining keys is equally likely to be the right one, so I would assume the best guess is that the correct key is found after searching half of the remaining keyspace. That would be 669 days (if I have calculated correctly).
Who bothers with RC5 anymore? All my systems are busy cranking away at calculating the number of bugs in Windows 2000 with the W2KB client.
This was the project that ignited massively distributed computing. The biggest projects are obviously SETI@Home and the handful of protein folding clients, but we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. This is still such an untapped resource that we will undoubtedly see some really incredible stuff in the near future. And the folks at RC5 were the ones that got the ball rolling.
Thanks.
"One of the consequences of the second law of thermodynamics is that a certain amount of energy is necessary to represent information."
"An ideal computer running at 3.2 degrees Kelvin [temperature of the cosmic background radiation of the universe] would consume 4.4*10^-16 ergs every time it set or cleared a bit."
"If we built a Dyson sphere around the sun and captured all of its energy for 32 years, without any loss, we could power a computer to count up to 2^192."
"These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than mattter and occupy something other than space."
Damn I love that. Bring on the cryptanalytic algae!
--
The default priority puts OGR first. Wouldn't RC5 go faster if it was first?
"I forgot my mantra."