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.

Comments

FINALLY.

[KFury]

Does this mean I can go back to alien hunting now?

How crazy is this?

[WalterGR]

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..."