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X-Box Private Key Challenge Ended
powerlord writes "The Neo Project (mentioned in a recent slashdot article) recently stopped its bid to recover the X-Box private key citing legal reasons: "Due to legal reasons, we will no longer be hosting or participating in the xbox challenge." DCers.com, a site devoted to distributed computing sheds some light on Neo's sudden flip-flop with a blurb claiming that: "... many legitiment DC'ers that have been working this project since it started that have decided to quit because of the new Neo client that also tries to crack the X-Box encryption." and that they believed this might ultimately kill The Neo Project."
A posting by Mike Curry (who's on The NEO Development Team) states: "We will not be answering questions or commenting anymore on this subject." See XBOX Challenge - Back to 576!
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Assuming a ludicrous number of 1 000 000 000 machines, managing to try a ludicruously high 1 000 000 000 000 numbers per second at random, it will take about 3 * 10^279 years. (I'm making some guesses, and assuming we're trying to find the prime factors of a product of two 1024 bit numbers or something like that)
Of course, cunning techniques will possibly reduce this number quite considerably, and it's probably really nowhere near that high, but wer're still talking about such a huge amount of time that the age of the universe seems irrelevent.
Neither XBOX, PS2 nor GameCube spin backwards. This is a moronic rumor that goes back to the PSX (I remember people telling me that they spun backwards). It resurfaced with dreamcast, and now with the latest gen of consoles. Mostly people say GCN spins backwards because it isn't being pirated yet. The panasonic GameCube-Q reverses directions when you put in a DVD or CD? Bah.
It's believed because know-nothing geek wannabe's think spinning backwards would be some kind of impenetrable protection scheme - believe me, if that's all there was to it, it'd be hacked just as long as it takes to reverse polarity to the motors. GCN isn't hacked (yet) because all of it's custom circuitry is smushed into two ICs and people still havent fully deciphered what does what, like where the GPU ends and CPU begins and where the BIOS/bootblock is, etc..
As if Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft would needlessly spend the billions in building new production facilities for what would be an absolutely idiotic and worthless protection scheme - what piglatin is to the world of ciphers, essentially.
I have all 3, and I can guarantee that they all do, in fact, spin in the same 'normal' direction.
Cutitout with this spins backwards nonsense. Just becuase you read it on the 'net doesn't make it true.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Due to a few..."parties" pressuring us if you will, we decided to halt the project to stop any legal troubles. We have said from the beginning that if any pressure was put upon us, the project wouldn't go any further. Well, too bad. we managed to check nearly a billion key, and ranked a good 1.5 years of CPU time in only a few days. thanks to all who participated - and a special thanks to those special people who pumped out amazing packet rates for XboxHacker.net
A billion! So they only had a bazillion gajillion to go.
For those of you that know nothing about RSA. The private key is not necessarily a prime number.
Here's how the key is generated:
1. Generate two large random primes, p and q, of approximately equal size such that their product n = pq is of the required bit length, e.g. 1024 bits.
2. Compute n = pq and phi = (p-1)(q-1).
3. Choose an integer e, 1 e phi, such that gcd(e, phi) = 1.
4. Compute the secret exponent d, 1 d phi, such that ed ß 1 (mod phi).
5. The public key is (n, e) and the private key is (n, d). The values of p, q, and phi should also be kept secret.
- n is known as the modulus.
- e is known as the public exponent or encryption exponent.
- d is known as the secret exponent or decryption exponent.
So, factoring n into it's parts (p and q... which are prime) and the public key would give you all the information you need to determine the private key.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Guys, instead of trying to do something whose only purpose is to allow people to rip off games, why not do something noble that will help humanity. Here are some suggestions:
e cts.html
1.) Seti@Home
2.) Cure Cancer
3.) Evolution@Home
4.) Entropia
5.) eOn
6.) Climate Prediction
7.) Particle Accelerator Design
8.) Analytical Spectroscopy Research Group
See a complete list here: http://www.aspenleaf.com/distributed/distrib-proj
And no, I don't consider cracking encryption "noble". Especially when people don't seem to get the point that if it takes tens of thousands of computers months and months to crack some encryption, it is GOOD ENCRYPTION.
I think that the audience interested in getting cheaper Xbox games, and the audience who dabbles in high strength math and complex technology may have a decidedly lesser coincedent subset than many here assume. An MIT student has already gone to all the trouble of recovering the key and explaining how to use it. He published a REALLY complete document on how he recovered the key and how it could be used and included the fact that if the key is changed, the architecture is such that it could be recovered again. While he doesnt actually give the key (he was discouraged from doing so after discussing his paper with M$), it would seem the measures needed would cost MUCH less than 100K for someone motivated. You can find your holy grail here: http://web.mit.edu/bunnie/www/proj/anatak/AIM-2002 -008.pdf
The NEO client is a piece of garbage.
One PC using the Quadratic Sieve can out-factor all the computer
power in the world using the NEO trial-divide method. (The
current best factoring algorithm for large composites is the
General Number Field Sieve.)