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
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.
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.
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"?
Does this mean I can go back to alien hunting now?
Kevin Fox
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
I don't know why the parent was modded up as funny, but:
There is a difference between saying "in theory, we could do this and that" and actually doing it.
Cryptography specifically is a realm of arbitrary large numbers, theoretical math way, way beyond what 99% of people ever learn in both school and university, and lots of guesswork, estimates, approximations, you name it.
I don't think anyone is really surprised by the outcome, but nevertheless, the only real proof that something can be done is and always will be to actually do it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...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
That's what has to be considered in all of this.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
How many computers were working on rc5-64 for how many years? White isn't that many factors faster.
All bets are off though once we get quantum machines up and running...provided we can get around the whole heisenberg principle.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
- 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
I'm with the OP on this. Once in a time there was a purpose with cracking DES; proving it wasn't as hard (secure) the government wanted people to believe. However, that was a long time ago now.
C'mon, estimating the time of a brute-force attack is almost trivial. Once you can time how long it takes to attack some percentage of the keyspace, interpolation to mid- and worst-case is simple.
There's a lot of other distributed problems to spend time on, problems where the solution actually is worth something.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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
I remember when this first started out they believed it would take about 1000 years to crack.
There's a lot of interesting information that comes from this aside from the actual problem being attacked.
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.
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?
Winning 10,000 dollars isn't productive?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
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?
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.
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?
http://members.ud.com/download/gold/
i would be happy to turn our computers loose on a problem which will result in something everyone can benifit from, but i'm not willing to install vmware to run it.
-- john
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!
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.
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
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/
All you'd need is a heisenberg compensator circuit connected to the machine, right?
Faulty logic. The cost to the winner is only his time invested, not everyone else's. Like playing the lotto, almost.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Not sure exactly what that entails but it seems like the results will be freely available if you fall into one of those camps.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
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!
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.
ASCI White (or, even better, Japan's new super computer) could probably crack RC5-64 in a matter of hours.
Hardly. We're talking about a third of a million participants taking 4 years here. Unless someone's developed a time machine and built ASCI from some future technology it's not that fast! (remember, many participants were science labs or other groups utilising several, sometimes hundreds of machines).
Now we should see project OGR really kick into gear!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I remember when this first started out they believed it would take about 1000 years to crack.
Probably because the scalability of a distributed computing system was underestimated. Know this, it took a boatload of CPU time to crack this thing---just as predicted. What was not properly estimated was how much parallelism would be achieved.
There's a lot of interesting information that comes from this aside from the actual problem being attacked.
From a cryptography science, none at all. This project added absolutely nothing to our knowledge of cryptography.
All of the interesting information learned was in the area of designing, organizing, and managing a distributed computing network, and the potential CPU power such as system could harness. That exact same knowledge could be gained attacking an exhaustive-search problem with some genuinely useful outcome, like protein folding perhaps.
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.
Of course, ASCI White (or, even better, Japan's new super computer) could probably crack RC5-64 in a matter of hours.
According to D.Net's press release, the peak rate achieved by D.Net on this effort was equivalent to ~46,000 2GHZ Athlon XP's working in tandem. Can even ASCI White or Japan's supercomputer match this sort of processing power?
I'll admit that the RC5-64 project had very little practical use, but it was a heck of a proof-of-concept in terms of people's willingness to donate vast amounts of CPU time and the staggering amount of otherwise-wasted computing power that's out there and waiting to be utilized.
I'd stuck with D.Net over the years even as more useful distributed applications cropped up, out of some sort of loyalty since I'd already invested so much (CPU) time in it. Now, I think I'll pick a more "useful" application like protein folding or something to occupy my spare cycles...
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
"All bets are off though once we get quantum machines up and running...provided we can get around the whole heisenberg principle."
Are you certain?
<rimshot/>
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Don't they teach math anymore?
Based on the numbers from distributed.net. The actual computing power used is equivalent to 32504 800Mhz Apple powerbook G4s running for 676 days. With the same number of powerbooks you could exhaust the keyspace in 790 days. For 100 million dollars USD you could buy 100000 Dell Athlon XPs from BestCry and exhaust the keyspace in a little over a year.
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.
Nope, we didn't even do that. We proved that given enough time, money, effort, and the first few characters of the decrypted message, RSA 64-bit encryption can be eventually broken using the amazing method of BRUTE FORCE.
Want something more interesting? Compress the message with a really good english language compression algorithm first, then encrypt it.
Not to sound too black-helicopterish or anything, but these are only the supercomputers that we know about.
Isn't it entirely possible that in the interests of tracking "terrorists", the Department of Homeland Security might just have assembled something that makes E.S. look like an old laptop?
The technology exists, it's just a simple matter of somebody (read: corporation / government) with the funding and wherewithall to put it together and make it function.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Millard? Puuleeez!
But there is a differing on the use of trillion
Trillion:
1. The cardinal number equal to 10^12.
2. Chiefly British. The cardinal number equal to 10^18.
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?
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?
Now I'm glad I shaved today and wore a (relatively) nice shirt.
Cows are cool. ]:8)
Look's like I'm the only one here that got that reference.
There is no "guy who made distributed.net" -- it is and has always been a collaborative effort and the product of many people's time, energy, and dedication. Even cow, himself, the reason the project was named the "Bovine RC5 Effort" (in February 1997) doesn't try to take credit for it.
Idiot. The OP is one of the founders of distributed.net and has something interesting (in my opinion) to say. I only saw one other thread in this article dealing with false positives and BovineOne added to that thread *after* he made this post.
Please go be a moron elsewhere. You aren't wanted.
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.
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.
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! :)
The Heisenberg Uncertainy principle basically states that their is no such thing as a truly closed system. Rough explanation is this: You can't look at something/anything without changing it somehow. In this application, the results gathered from a quantum computer wouldn't be accurate because to obtain them, you had to observe, and therefore changed something, no matter how small.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
I can't tell if you're a troll or not.... It has a leading '0'.
0 11 01000000111001 (ignore the slashdot space behind the curtain).
01100011110111100111110111000001010101001111010
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
But why did you send me a bill for finding my cat?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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.
My bad. It was a Compaq not a Dell. It is a single XP 2100+. You can deffinately go cheaper. You probably can get the same result for half that. Cheaper still if you built dedicated hardware.
Love/hate the sig. Very creative...
Kevin Fox
Assuming you don't use it with a web browser - the fundamental flaw.
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...
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.