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RC5-64 Project Teeters At The Halfway Mark

Posted by timothy on from the always-in-the-last-place-you-look dept.

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.?"

7 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Half the keyspace... by Hobbex · · Score: 5

    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...

  2. Re:Best quote in a Slashdot article... by wiredog · · Score: 4
    It differs because, well, umm, uh, let's see.

    What was the question again?

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    Best Slashdot Co
  3. "Public Domain" Distributed Computing by Hard_Code · · Score: 5

    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.

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  4. Best quote in a Slashdot article... by mikeage · · Score: 5
    "Anybody want to speculate...?"

    And this differs from a typical slashdot set of comments how?

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  5. Great work! by kaunio · · Score: 4

    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.

  6. Who runs that one? by briggsb · · Score: 5

    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.

  7. RC5's biggest contribution by ryanvm · · Score: 5
    What's really interesting about the RC5-64 project is that it's biggest contribution to computer science has absolutely nothing to do with encryption.

    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.