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RC5-64 Success
Peter Trei writes "After over four years of effort, hundreds of
thousands of participants, and millions of
cpu-hours of work, Distributed.net has brute forced the key to RSA Security's 64 bit encryption challenge, winning a US$10,000 prize. Still outstanding Challenges carry prizes as high as $200,000. RSA's PR release is here. d.net's site has not yet been updated." Update: 09/26 16:59 GMT by CN : The good folks over at SlashNET are having a forum with the distributed.net crew on Saturday at 21:00 UTC. It'll be a great time to meet some of the people who made this possible.
Link here: http://www.distributed.net/pressroom/news-20020926 .html
now distributed net can get onto the task of how to get my sofa out of the stairway
So somehow has proven that given enough time, money and effort, RSA 64-bit encryption can be eventually broken using the amazing method of...
BRUTE FORCE.
Who woulda thought.
~ kjrose
Funny. The RC5 algorithm has just been removed from OpenBSD because of copyrights.
{{.sig}}
While it's debatable that the duration of this project does much to devalue the security of a 64-bit RC5 key by much, we can say with confidence that RC5-64 is not an appropriate algorithm to use for data that will still be sensitive in more than several years' time.
:)
Heh, it took a world-wide effort of thousands of computers over 1700 days. I don't think there is any debate at all; they proved the opposite of what they set out to prove.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Windows 2000 cracks RSA 64 challenge. Steve Balmer said, "This further demonstrates the tremedous power of the Windows 2000 platform." Balmer further commented, "It also demonstrates Windows great strength when it comes to security!"
Who would have guessed?
I stopped participating because my machines would all run significantly hotter, and it's already hot enough in this room as it is. Maybe I'll start again come winter time and if it gets cold in here.
-- gid
I suppose I can shut dnetc down for now and give my processors a rest. Congratulations to whoever got the lucky key.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Now I have to shut down all my clients. I don't have any desire to lend my spare cycles to OGR or whatever other silliness they are doing.
Nice, except for the fact it doesn't matter. It wasn't even the real encryption code. Also, it never would have happened without distributed processing, so this isn't a real demonstration of computing power, but actually a demonstration of distributed computing power.
If you don't know what Zoo Blacklisting is, click here.
So tell me, was the answer "42"?
"RC5-64 Encryption Worthless, Hax0rz Now 0wn All Your Pr0n"
123
I'm gay.
But it only shows that the encryption algorithms are intrinsecaly secure...
But who's doing it for the money anyway...
You can't shut us down! The Internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people's ideas!
Does this mean I can go back to alien hunting now?
Kevin Fox
Let's see, 321,000+ participants dividing a check of $10,000, that breaks down to $0.03 per participant... pretty sad when the postage to send your check is more than the check is for.... reminds of the time a creditor sent me a dun for $0.12, it cost them more in postage (including the pre-paid return mailer) then it gained them...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Since that the RC5-64 algorithm has finally been brute forced, perhaps we can put those now idle computers to work looking for ET? Seems a more worthwhile effort to me...
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Or maybe a really big computer!
Althought it took this group a lot of time to break it, I could see a "wealthier" group putting together resources and doing it faster...
So RC5-64 is insecure?
:-)
Damn... I guess I'm gonna just have to start hashing my data to keep it secure.
Too bad there are 99% easier ways to compromise "secure" online transaction systems, not to mention ways to compromising the servers that run these systems.
Just see A Guide to Building Secure Web Applications.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
I'd say not.. in several years time, the average laptop / home PC will be able to crank out the work that the distributed project did in a week or so... meaning in a few years, an individual will be able to decrypt RC5-64 data in a realistic timeframe for (mis)use.
That's the point.... is RC5-64 (effectively) safe today? It sure the heck is.. this project proved that! Will it be safe in 5 years? Heck no, and that was the point.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
While this is an admirable achievement, I found another distributed computing project which I think is more worthwhile -- namely, Folding @Home, which is a distributed protein-folding simulation effort. This is the kind of research that will end up curing things like Alzheimer's, and I think it's a better use of your processing time than brute-forcing encryption keys (or even SETI, or Primenet). I encourage everyone to participate in F@H instead, as I think it will provide a greater benefit to us all in the long run.
/. may need to be reminded that they are indeed free to run whatever distributed computing software they feel like; I am merely requesting that they run this one.
Of course, some on
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Maybe if we were using that power to analize Pi in base 11 we would find the hidden message before the end of the world.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Big deal, to be honest. Where's those googly eyed, green guys when we need them?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Yeah, all those Hax0rz need is 350,000 computers, a worldwide network to link them and five years, and they can have all the porn!
Many people seem to think that this proves that the security is now insecure, or that the 300,000+ volunteers and 4 years of work means that this is an impractical security breach and the award is meaningless. The boat left you standing on the dock.
As it says in the PR, the scientific achievement here is that the security has now been quantified. The security challenge isn't just "super tough" to crack, or "practically impossible", but required exactly X bajillion processor cycles to crack. It's like the difference between "water freezes when it gets really cold," and "water freezes at 0 Celcius." That knowledge doesn't make your ice box less useful, but you do know how to configure the thing to make ice cubes.
The real question on my mind is whether or not that $10,000 prize will be distributed among the 300,000+ distributed volunteers. Prize money indeed...
...several computers during this 64bit phase of RSA cracking. Started with a K6-233, then K62-450, dual Celeron 450, Duron 800, Athlon 1GHz, Athlon 1.4GHz and now AthlonXP 1700+ @ 2000+. I wonder what we will be running when (if?) RC5-72 is cracked.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
with the new Intel 4.7-GHz chip you too can do this but in less than 10 minutes!
It's not as fancy as looking for Darth Vader, but I'm sure most of you had somebody close with cancer, alzheimer, diabetes, etc.
20 years from now, when I have newly-minted-by-global-warming underwater property in Boston, I'll come after every Slashdot geek I can find with a shotgun. How irresponsible.
Its kinda funny how one thing takes all that time using all those computers to crack, but 5 days after a new program comes out http://astalavista.box.sk has a crack or a keygenerator for it.
I'd like to know how much electricity was used, or how many tons of
fossil fuel was consumed to produce this result. Any reasonable guesses?
For the first time you can actually watch the owner of a website watch his server crash and burn via a webcam :-)
http://members.slacker.com/~nugget/camb.php
Found via : Distributed Webcams
...you can crack any algorithm. Encryption algorithms are always going to be time-sensitive. You can brute force anything...it's just a matter of whether or not you can do it in a realistic amount of time. Taking the rate at which technology changes and becomes faster, I don't think that we should ever realistically expect an algorithm to last more than a few years.
"Herbivores eat well cause their food never, ever runs."
Well it's obvious they should of started at the other end and worked backwards. It being 2/3's of the way through the keyspace, they would of got it much quicker! I mean duh!
- They know exactly how insecure RC5-64 is. They want other IT groups, industry groups and tech managers to know it. The easiest way to do that is to offer open challenges with cash prizes. It's never hard for RSA to up their bit-length to 4096, say, a year before 2048 RSA is broken, and someone collects their $200,000. It is hard to make PHBs understand that RC5-64 is not secure if nobody has broken it.
Secondly, Distributed.net clearly isn't doing it for the cash. I didn't do it for the cash, either. (Although I wouldn't have minded winning.) They're doing it because:- Breaking codes gives nerds their kicks.
- Building a distributed computing architecture is a difficult and interesting problem.
With current technology, as RSA likes to demonstrate, the winners are the cryptographers, not the cryptologists (the code breakers.) Quantum computing may change that, and make the cryptologists the winners. Until then, RSA can happily give cash prizes for increasing length keys: the numbers are on their side.From the press release - "a coordinated team of computer programmers and enthusiasts, known as distributed.net, has solved the RC5-64 Secret-Key Challenge."
If you remove a single element - the $10,000 award offered by RSA - then the press release would read more like,
"A group of degenerate hackers [sic] cracked an encryption method owned by RSA Security Inc. The company has contacted law enforcement authorities, and an attempt to track down these hackers [sic] is currently under way. Under the DMCA, these criminals, when caught, faces sentances of up to..."
The Online Slang Dictionary
Give me a break, we knew this is what d.net would say when RC5 was broken regardless of how much time it took. I think they've just proved the point that RC5 is pretty damned good.
It was me -- I won!
I was hoping they would get to 100% and still not find the key!
:o(
Now, I get to miss out on all that head scratching.
Ok, so who wants to work out the electricity consumed per block, and calculate the COST of cracking RC5? Remember that as RC5 just uses idle cycles, all the used energy was energy that could have been saved by turning the computers off!
*laffs*
What's next?
As you've just dispensed information which used be used to circumvent a digital media protection device.
I'm too tired to explain why, I'm sure someone else will pick up the buck on this one.
into doing very expensive PR for them.
This is exactly this sort of result they had hoped for - even their low-grade keys need a world-wide network of computers and months to crack their marketing deptartment will report.
The $10K prize is a joke compared to the cost/time of the compute power involved.
Surely we can put our spare cycles to better use to society than this?
I'm using putty (development version) to connect from a Win box to a linux box.
I'm glad I'm using 1024bit encryption. They've worked so hard to do 64 bit. But each additional bit is a redoubling in the amount of computing power it's going to take to decrypt my packets. Good luck!
I've only got port 22 port fowarded from my router.
You just aint getting in!
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
In one of my CS classes, we were discussing distributed computing, and a question of any well-known distributed computing projects was asked. I answered "Distributed.net" - and the instructor promptly asked "What's that?" The next student to respond, of course, said SETI: the answer he was looking for.
Maybe I'm biased, as the former maintainer of distributed-net for Debian, but has Distributed.net really become this unimportant and forgotten?
Over the course of the RC5-64 project, 331,252 individuals participated. We tested 15,769,938,165,961,326,592 keys.
anyone help out?
Well, at least my G3 and G4 at home will get to spin down at nights now... and I can dedicate all the spare cpu on my sparc at work to seti :)
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
"Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines ...."
800 MHz G4 is faster crunching the keys than a 2 GHz Athlon XP
I am reading that right?
Crypto experts will call an encryption algorithm sound if knowing the full details of that algorithm, the most effective way of cracking it is to try every key. This is what they STRIVE for.
If the best way to break a cryptosystem is to brute force it, they have a very good idea of the real-world usability of that key length.
If the 64 bit key took 4 years with 312,000 or so users with our current technology, then cryptographers know how many real world CPU cycles it takes (why am I thinking of tootsie pops for some reason?) to break. From there, it is simple enough to compare that number of cycles to the current state of computing to determine future crack times.
Look at the Military... if they have a message about an impending operation that is 1 day to 3 years away, and the best effort anyone can bring to bear on decrypting it will take 4 years, then in a practical sense, that message is unbreakable.
However, a secret one plans to keep for say 20 years better have a key length long enough so that even accounting for Moore's law, the key will take longer than that to break... of course, the real problem is that if there is some new mathematical breakthrough that allows radically faster factoring, (quantum computing anyone?) then all these results are meaningless.
The Digital Sorceress
In the interests of speed, only the first "block" of the crypted text is decrypted and evaluated for a solution. This means that it's possible for a key which isn't the correct key to report as a false positive because although it doesn't decrypt the text it does yield a plaintext which matches "The unkn" for the first eight bytes.
There's been much speculation and napkin scribbling on just how frequently such false positives might present themselves. The general consensus seemed to be that such an occurrence is extremely improbable but in a dataset the size of 2**64, extremely improbable may still yield a nonzero frequency.
The key 0xBB27D52F60FD932C does, indeed, decrypt to a plaintext for which the first eight bytes match the known plaintext for the contest. The remainder of the decrypted text, however, is just garbage. This key has actually been returned by clients twice over the course of the contest.
In August 1999, "Edward Scissorhands" turned in the key.
Again in July 2000, Team RC5 Chile submitted it. Since they're unfortunately using a shared email address for their team, there's no way to know which individual was the submitter.
I wasn't the winning key, but was a really unique "near miss". It also represents an interesting datapoint regarding the RC5 algorighim. A brute-force search is really the only way to conclusively determine the liklihood of such false positives.
Wow, working at that rate, a 128-bit key could be broken in only 4 billion years. That is, if you had 300 trillion people working on it. Aren't exponential algorithms fun?
0x000000000000002a
In the process, we have learned absolutely nothing. It's like a game where I say "I'm thinking of a place, can you guess where it is?" Then hundreds of thousands of you would send in guesses, and eventually you would get it. What a pointless exercise that would be! I'm sorry, but I don't see the difference here. In a way this is even less interesting, because you know that sometime the code will crack. There is no element of surprise at all in the results, and once we have it, we learn... nothing at all.
In the process, how much electricity do we waste chugging through the code? Did one of you clever people calculate how many fewer tons of CO2, soot and radioactive waste would have been produced if you had just left your Athlons turned off? How about all the air conditioners you used to cool the rooms the Athlons live in?
For the next challenge, I suggest that you just pretend your CPU is working, and in a few months (time determined randomly according to the probability of cracking if your computers had been on), the guy who issued the challenge will pretend that his code was cracked and announce what his oh-so-important secret message was. That would sure make me happier--and it's not like we'd lear any less that way.
(Notice also that my criticism doesn't apply to SETI or protein folding projects. At least they give us a chance of finding out something.)
For the last project, CSC, we had to exhaust the entire keyspace and then go back and recheck some of the work.
Congrats to everyone who participated.
And just for kicks, here are my final stats on the project:
Rank: 38501 (out of 331,286)
First block: 25-Sep-1999
Last Block: 22-Sep-2002
Days working: 1,094 (out of 1,796)
Total Blocks: 226,544 (out of 61,015,324,138!)
The odds were 1 in 3,802,292 that I would have found the lucky key before anyone else.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
Ok... "thousands of computers" and 1700 days. Let's call it 2000 computers putting in full 24 hours days. And let's assume that Moore's Law will remain true...
Cracking RC5-64 took 384,000 computer/hours today. There are 168 hours in a week. So, for one computer to crack RC5-64 in a matter of weeks (less than five) would require a computer about 460 times faster than what we have now; assuming moore's law keeps going, we'll get those in about 13 years (2015).
In five years (48 months), computers will be about 2.6 times as fast powerful as they are now; it'll still take over 147,000 computer-hours to crack the same code; one computer would take 16 years to crack that.
(The same 2000 computers, once upgraded, could replicate their feat in a measly 654 days--still, two years.)
And, of course, this assumes that Moore's Law remains constant, there's no overhead, and distributed.net's brute force test is a good example; it could have gotten lucky, or it could have taken them an unusually short time to find the right code.
For a realisitic cracking scenerio, let's say our cracker has ten computers and wants to crack the code in a week... he'd still have to wait 8 years to be able to do it, and who'd want to bother with 13 year old data for cracking, anyway?
lets see, if we take a cutting edge computer from 4 years ago as the average power of d.nets computers (a sloppy assumption), and then say only half 500 of them are working at any time (more sloppieness), that leaves us with 500 computers from 1998. missusing moore's law to say it is seed and not just transistor count (fairly effective approximation) and go 11 years from now, that is plus 4 years is 10 18 month doubles.
2^10 = 1024 times the power of a dnet computer.
that means it will take one computer 4 years to solve the RC5-64.
obviously at that point the super computers can chew right througgh it, but for even a network of desktop 10 or so desktop computers this is non trivial.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
... were inadverently fed into the RSA search, and interesting patterns developed which were determined to be an alien world's attempt to flagrantly disregard their version of the DMCA with pop tunes such as "Shake those crazy antennae", "Happy CycleDay", "Zoood I did it again", and Lanthinatica's hit "Enter SmallRoundPebblesFoundOnBeach Man."
Earth's branch of the RIAU (Recording Industry Artists of the Universe), the RIAA said that they would begin to crack down on these pirate receivers and guarantee their brothers in the stars more revenue...
I stick to walls...
... at our peak rate we could expect to exhaust the keyspace in 790 days. Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines...
Uh, I think it's going to be a VERY long time before the average laptop / home PC does this in a week.
I'm surprised at how stunned and emotional I am upon reading this. After personally investing almost four years and uncounted trillions of clock cycles for over half a quadrillion keys and just like that it's over with. *sigh*
I watched the progression of the computer industry grow just by watching the gradual increase of my daily keyrate.
Four years ago when I first started, I was going through 52 blocks a day. Yesterday, I went through 2784 blocks. Looking at the daily graph is practically a history of my life for four years. I can see spikes where my company bought a dozen computers and I borrowed their cycles for a couple of days while I configured them. I can see dips where I turned my computers off to go on vacation for a weekend. There's the whole flat area from last year when I didn't have a job and so had limited access to extra CPU cycles.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
300 Watts * 1 million hours = 300,000 kilowatt hours. 300,000 kilowatt hours * $0.10 = $30,000.
I wonder how many U.S. and Iraqi soldiers died to make this great display of wasted energy possible.
The important thing here has nothing at all to do with cryptography. The important thing is that some how, some way, Nugget and Co. managed to get 300,000+ people together to do something (semi-)constructive. If this was a parade or a demonstration, it would get national news coverage. However, since these guys are "just a bunch of geeks" there is little fanfare. It passes with relative quiet into the sunset. I would personally like to thank the guys at distributed.net . You guys proved something here and anyone who can't see that it has nothing at all to do with RC5 needs to just move along.
You're very bad at math.
that laptop would have to run at about 30000000000MHz, assuming that (and this is probably low) 1000000 CPU years assuming PIII/500MHz were spent on this project...
Good luck finding one of those
How smart can they really be?
Just about the only book I think *everyone* on Slashdot must've read.
Which, incidentally, includes an episode where one-time pads are broken. Oh well.
Scanning outer space for the remote possibility of advanced alien life, which may or may not have any interest in even contacting us... versus the very real and present problem of testing the security of a widely-used encryption algorithm.
Yeah, sure, that's a much more "worthwhile" pursuit.
See, 64-bit can be broken in four years. Time to move to 65-bit, that'll keep us safe until 2010 or so. Wake up, people!
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Naturally there is a lot of interest about finding the solution, but what about "almost solutions" found by false-positive hits?
In the interests of speed, only the first "block" of the crypted RC5-64 text is decrypted and evaluated for a solution. This means that it's possible for a key which isn't the correct key to report as a false positive because although it doesn't decrypt the text it does yield a plaintext which matches "The unkn" for the first eight bytes.
The key 0xBB27D52F60FD932C does, indeed, decrypt to a plaintext for which the first eight bytes match the known plaintext for the contest. This key has actually been submitted three times over the course of the contest, once by three different users.
In August 1999, again in July 2000. Most recently, the bymer@ukrpost.net worm found the false-positive on November 6, 2001. There potentially could be problems identifying the
owner of that worm-infected machine and having to explain the circumstances of a winning solution, but fortunately that was only a false positive.
Fortunately, we eventually found the actual key. But because we were seeing these legitimate false-positives being reported throughout the duration of the contest, we had full confidence that our network and our clients were functioning properly and that we would eventually find the actual solution in time.
Don't waste those cycles! Put them to use! http://www.distributed.net/
I'm surprised the distributed team is thinking of going to the RC5-72 bit challenge. Even with the average CPU speeds increasing, it'll take another 5 years probably to crack it.
Given the payout for this stuff, I'd have expect some expert cryptographers are working on the 128 bit algorithm, looking for cracks to reduce the brute force time...that's what I would be doing at this point had I the skill...not focusing on the crummy brute force attacks....
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
In further news all participating Distributed.net users will be issued a check for 1 Cent.
How about we all focus our attention to something worth while now? Seti is cool, but we don't have any direct and imediate gains for finding alien life a billion light years away. The information we'd be communicating would be ... a billion years old.
How about Cancer research? It's already been proven beneficial.
http://members.ud.com/about/getting_started/
UD!! Sign up today and get cracking!
(unfortunately they only have win32/intel clients, doh!)
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
A beowulf cluster of those laptops!
(Sorry, I couldn't let that one go.)
Wouldn't a contest like this be illegal under the DMCA? True, the company sponsored the contest, and asked that you try to break it, but technically speaking, couldn't they be prosecuted for it? It was for research, but the DMCA is so vaguely worded that I think that this contest was illegal.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I think you underestimate the scale of the problem - RSA's press release says there were over 300,000 people working on it for nearly five years. So, if Moore's Law continues to hold (a doubling of CPU power every 18 months or so), then in five years' time, computers will be, on average, 3 1/3 times faster than they are today. That means that you could repeat the RC5-64 "experiment" with 90,000 people, instead of 300,000, but it would still take nearly five years. Or you use the same number of people, and they'd be able to do it about 17 months.
I agree that, given enough doublings of CPU power, it will become feasible to crack RC5-64 with a single machine, but by my calculations, such a machine won't exist for 30 or 40 years. No doubt by then, if we're not already using quantum computers, we'll have something like RC20-65536, and cracking that will still need hundreds of thousands of machines to crunch numbers for years.
Just another wannabe fantasy novelist...
Rc5 cracking works on bit operations. Imagine you have a binary number 00000001 well distributed tests the next number bu moving the bit one space so the next number it tires is 00000010 and then 00000100 and so on and so on and then 00000011 00000110, etc...
Some processors move the bits faster then others because they have a register in the CPU to do this, and some don't. The AMD K5 was extremely fast at this because it had the register for this, where as the K6 had to use 4 registers to move the bit one space.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines
Am I missing something here? Are they claiming the 800mhz G4 is over 1.4 times as fast as an Athlon 2ghz??
Looks like the writer has been exposed to the "Steve Jobs reality distortion field" for a little too long...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Er, your rant is rather mis-placed: my instructor was actually a professor of computer science, Stephen Mann. From the stories he told in class, he knows a lot about the history of CS, and was just not in the 'know' on this topic, because SETI is simply more popular than Distributed.net these days, and few people know that Distributed.net even exists - a sad thing.
OGR does not work for my systems. One system got a Node and processed for over a week before I turned it off and got it back to dnet. So, what is next?
Right now I am powerdown systems that ran for two extra months becuase of programming errors a DNET.
It is nice to donate time and power, but to have a meaning project to do...
So, if Moore's Law continues to hold (a doubling of CPU power every 18 months or so), then in five years' time, computers will be, on average, 3 1/3 times faster than they are today.
2^(5/1.5) = 10.08.
In 5 years, CPU power should be 10 times what it is today.
That would explain why the weathers cooling down now...
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
What is an amazing result of this contest is showing just how much computing power is available in the world today.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
...because it refers to transitor density ALONE, not speed of the machines. Or do you think that the current state-of-the-art PC is only around 32K times faster than the original IBM-PC--not just in raw CPU speed, but in overall throughput?
BTW: 2002-1982=20 years
20*12=240 months
240/18=15 Moore's Law cycles
Is this English? Maybe someone with a more lenient English grammar parser can clarify what this guy means?
It is nice to donate time and power, but to have a meaning project to do...
.... to do what?
mooooooo!
the south bay slashdot meetup is tonight at st. johns bar in sunnyvale... the guy who made distributed.net was there for the first one, if you are reading, are you coming tonight?? $3 pitchers of beer for celebration... i better bring my credit card.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I wonder how much the total costs of the electrical power involved in this effort was. I can imagine that it is not very efficient, with people using old power supplies, buzzing hard drives, and even montiors with some cool related screensaver.
As for the research projects, what if they could choose between (A) getting all the money spent on power for the computation or (B) getting the computation itself.
If (A) is true, then this is something that is just a cool but inefficient way of collecting donations. I hope (B) is the case, which would really mean that this is a synergetic and productive effort.
Tor
True, the company sponsored the contest, and asked that you try to break it, but technically speaking, couldn't they be prosecuted for it?
The DMCA's circumvention ban applies only to access control mechanisms on copyrighted works, when such mechanisms are broken without authorization. The RC5-64 encryption is not an access control mechanism on a copyrighted work.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's a rehash of this comment and its replies.
Damn karma whores. You aren't wanted.
So why are the keyservers still sending out packets?
In another post, someone calculated the cost at about $30,000 in electricity, assuming 300 watt power supplies.
But when you said
"all the used energy was energy that could have been saved by turning the computers off!",
you were being a little ignorant.
Did you ever stop to think that some people don't leave their computers on just to run the dnet client, and that it runs in the background as they're, say, posting a comment to slashdot? Or that the client is running on a computer that is left on 24/7 anyway, known as a server?
Silly guy...
There's actually a copy of the book sitting on the shelf here. Can you refer me to a page number where this bullcrap takes place, so I can debunk it?
Anyhow, my client just starts, tries to connect to the server and gets and error message like the following...
[Sep 26 17:32:37 UTC] NetUpdate::Connect handshake failed. (0.168)
So atleast it's not going to sit there and make up random keys anymore. It may have been a slight security risk (possibly) but maybe dnet should've sent a special request that would show a little message when you click on the cow (or make the cow change color so you would click on it.. ie Chocolate cow) so you'd know to uninstall it if you wern't paying attention to the news.
Oh well, I've been doing rc5 since my junior year of high school and have a lot of memories of installign in, uninstalling it, taking over a friends install, and him taking over mine. It was a lot of good times for this little silly program... installing it on all the computers in high school was a blast. It was truly a great forum to bring a lot of geeks together. The Slashdot team, 2600, FreeBSD and Linux Groups... all competing in a silly encryption game. :)
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
Depending on the speed of your machine, OGR stubs may indeed take a very long time (many hours typically). If you have a relatively slow machine, this may indeed keep your machine busy for more than a day--just be patient. The individual size of each OGR workunit can varies greatly from one workunit to the next, by design.
Don't waste those cycles! Put them to use! http://www.distributed.net/
Here are some Perl scripts that make use of a modified version of Crypt::RC5 to decrypt the RC5-64 solution, the RC5-56 solution, and the RC5-64 false-positive.
http://www1.distributed.net/~bovine/perl-rc5/
Don't waste those cycles! Put them to use! http://www.distributed.net/
Wait a second...didn't I just see an article on Slashdot about how the Internet transfers about 2 TB of data per day?
105GKeys/sec * 8 bytes/key / 2TB/day * 86,400 sec/day * 100% = 35,437.5%
Those numbers don't add up. If, however, I change 2TB/day to 2TB/sec:
105GKeys/sec * 8 bytes/key / 2TB/sec * 100% = 41% of the Internet's traffic.
There's gotta be something a bit off here...My mind just doesn't want to register that almost half of the internet's bandwidth is part of a massive computer cluster.
What's this Submit thingy do?
I forget that every slashdot reader takes everything ever posted as LITERAL =)
It was an EXAMPLE............ then again, since you don't know if any new technology will come out in the next 5 years that will blow Moore's law out of the water. So I could be right. =P
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Peter Trei (the RSA mind behind the secret key challenges and the article submitter for this story) explains that the secret key challenges (DES, RC5-foo) were designed to mimic the structure of an attack on captured IPSEC traffic where one could similarly search for valid or recognizable header information.
Rather than being an unrealistic excercise, the method used to brute-force the RC5-64 and other RSA Labs secret key challenges is actually relevant for this very reason.
The scenario is not as improbable as you imply.
11000111101111001111101110000010101010011110100110 1000000111001
Not counting the stupid space Slash is adding in there... there are only 63 bits! Why is one missing?
BTW, it works out for the false positive key Nugget mentioned: 0xBB27D52F60FD932C =
101110110010011111010101001011110110000011111101 1001001100101100
(64 bits total)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Damn. It's over. Guess I'll have to try some other client to benchmark my Octane and my Athlon.
How many distributed clients have IRIX, Win32, and Linux/x86 versions out there?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
I just remembered I have a 386-25 sitting on a shelf, telnet in, and sure enough, it is still running the dnet client. (This before OGR clients) Linux 2.0.36. Looks like the power company decided to reboot it 20 days ago. Nice little headles machine running off a 80Mb harddrive. Did something like 2 blocks a day.
Here's to old machines, and an operatoring system that can keep them running for years! Thank you Linus, and all the other hackers that went into making linux stable.
The RC5-64 encryption is not an access control mechanism on a copyrighted work.
That didn't turn out right. Let me clarify: The RC5-64 cipher can in theory be used in an access control mechanism. However, RSA's RC5-64 contest isn't such a mechanism.
Now that RC5-64 is complete, please consider installing the distributed client from UD which aims to cure cancer. If you're going to donate your space CPU cycles to a project, I'd challenge you to find any other distributed computing project with as much meaning and benefit to mankind.
More information can be found here
RC5-56 can now be cracked in 6 days
RC5-48 can be cracked in less than 24 hours
RC5-40 can be cracked in minutes.
You just wait and see who has the last laugh when SETI@home manages to detect an alien signal only to discover that it's rc5 encrypted! :)
I want my share!!!
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
The pathetic part of this distributed computing victory is that the solution sat around undetected for some unspecified time.
Imagine. Talking hundreds of thousands of persons to work on a problem for several years, and then not thoroughly debugging the code to detect a solution.
Boners.
Is anyone knowlegable enough out there to take a guess at how much power may have been used for this project in the last four years and how the energy consumption translates to pollution?
For help, consider this discussion.
Of course, to calculate this, there are some assumptions that have to be made-- how many machines were on solely for the purpose of cracking keys, how much energy on average does a machine use, and what percentage of that is used by the processor when cracking, improvements in keycracking speed and energy efficiency over four years, etc.
Anyone up for it?
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
What I always thought would be cool would be to figure out how to run it on my GeForce2 card using the triangle processors when I'm not playing Quake
Probably not an option with the GF2, but I wonder if more recent chipsets could actually be used in this way? Could the data be fed in and pushed back out?!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
With the recent completion of the RC5-64 project by Distributed.net, power shortages around the globe have suddenly disappeared. CPU's are actually being left IDLE... expect power consumption to reach previous levels within a few weeks as former dnet members rush to switch their crack-racks over to SETI@home
...I can rest.
Love/hate the sig. Very creative...
Kevin Fox
Assuming you don't use it with a web browser - the fundamental flaw.
cheers!
yes, yes 128 bits is a mere 2^64 times harder than rc5 64 but man wouldn't it be funny to see the look on their face when 1,000,000 slashdot junkies break their little code in a mere 1000 years.
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
I've seen many comments on what this means to security systems, but I think it demonstrates a much more important thing. This succsess has shown that large distributed Volunteer based natwork processing is actually feaisible. Aftr all SETI has nothing to show yet. Those wondering what to do with their space CPU cycles should consider seriously helping the OGR solution which has tangible aplicaions. Also,since the best use of these systems is brute force analisys of lagre packitizable (is that a real word?) data sets it would be interesting to know what other mathematical problems can be dealt with this way.
Well done to dnet!!
I hope that's not the same vector engine that they use in the PS2, because if it is, hoo boy...
[insert witty comment here]
I left a machine turned on at one of my former jobs, and it's crunching rc5 blocks still.
I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT IS!
Is there any way to find out where the rogue machine is? heh..
It's submitting about 200 blocks a day. I just wish that I could FIND it...
OGR sounds nice in theory, but the way distributed.net handles it is bullshit.
There have been no results posted for OGR-24 yet, i.e. we still don't know if this exercise made any sense.
We learned how to create a giant distributed network and how to divide large amounts of computationally intensive work to potentially hostile clients in such a fashion so as to ensure that blocks of work were actually completed, allowing newer distributed networks that actually attempted to solve better problems.
Distributed.net was interesting because of the method, not because of the actual solution. Yes, we knew it would be possible. But this really shows that it is indeed possible to create a working implementation, and that people very well might be willing to give away CPU cycles to a common goal. Yeah, breaking RC5 may not have been that interesting or useful, but demonstrating and creating a functional distributed network definately is.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
We've got the DCTI forum logs up if anyone missed the IRC chat.
What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go around the sun. If we went
around the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.
-- Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet"
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