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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
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
No, it is: "some things are better left unread". This doesn't apply to Douglas Adams, of course.
I'm sure 42 was tested in one of the 15,769,938,165,961,326,592 keys tried.
The unknown message is: some things are better left unread
Hmmm... as it says here:
RSA Labs is offering a US$10,000 prize to the group that wins this contest. The distribution of the cash will be as follows:
$1000 to the winner
$1000 to the winner's team - this would go to the winner if he wasn't affiliated with a team
$6000 to a non-profit organization, decided by vote
$2000 to distributed.net for building the network and supplying the code
The vote will be decided on through an extension of the statistics engine, with one vote per block per person.
And to think.. it took a few seconds to find that, and a couple minutes to type your post..
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
Yes, and don't forget genome@home. You might consider joining the Wicked Old Atheists even :-)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Not really. If you consider that over 5 years, the average keyrate is 105.5 GKeys/sec, and the latest day averages were somewhere around 180 GKeys/sec, it means the same thing could have been finished in almost half the time, if it was started now with today's computers. Moore's law being what it is, if it really was started again now, it would take around half that time again, because more powerful CPUs are to be unveiled in that timeframe.
By their own estimates, it would take ~46000 Athlon XP 2GHz (now, where are you to find those right now?) to have 270 GKeys/sec (their peak rate in 5 years), which gives completing the keyspace in 790 days. Who would buy that much CPUs? Good question. With 2 dual MP motherboards in 1U (too lazy to find a link, I know somebody offers something like that), it would only take about 300 40U racks. Would you bet future national security on it? I don't think I would (and I'm not even american).
What it really shows is that brute-force can succeed, given enough time. But of course the more effective way to attack an encrytion algorithm is on the algorithmic side, because it helps you to find not only one cleartext, but all cleartexts encrypted with that algorithm.
fifteen quintillion seven hundred sixty-nine quadrillion nine hundred thirty-eight trillion one hundred sixty-five billion nine hundred sixty-one million three hundred twenty-six thousand five hundred ninty-two.
In american english of course. I recall something about the british having "Millard" between million and thousand.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
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.
No, you can still work on the optimal golomb ruler project (OGR), which is an interesting distributed project that becomes exponentially more difficult for each added mark. Currently they are working on a 25-mark ruler, and verifying the 24-mark ruler. From the linked page: "OGR's have many applications including sensor placements for X-ray crystallography and radio astronomy. Golomb rulers can also play a significant role in combinatorics, coding theory and communications, and Dr. Golomb was one of the first to analyze them for use in these areas."
"I may be quite wrong." - Socrates
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?
You've forwarded the proposition that
U.S. and Iraqi soldiers had to die to run the decryption.
Which yields the converse:
If wasn't run, no U.S. and Iraqi soldiers would have had to die.
Which is patently untrue. You're attempt at an emotional appeal as an argument was not only weak, it was stupid. You might as well have said that not turning off your lights when you're not using them causes soldiers to die.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
No, it is: "some things are better left unread".
;-)
Actually, if you read closely, the plaintext output is:
"The unknown message is: some things are better left unread"
I admit I didn't get it at first, but if just you read closely...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects has a good list of current projects. I have been waiting for Climate Prediction to start. There have been several stories on it here before. In the mean time I have been giving spare CPU cyctes to Distributed Particle Accelerator Design.