Slashdot Mirror
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
No, it is: "some things are better left unread". This doesn't apply to Douglas Adams, of course.
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
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.
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