Finding MD5 Collisions With Chinese Lottery

Posted by simoniker on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @11:22AM from the soon-to-be-distributed-slashdotting dept.

Stanislav Shalunov writes "Jean-Luc Cooke posted a Usenet article describing a distributed webpage-based effort (Chinese Lottery) to find a collision in the MD5 function. All you need to do to participate in the effort is visit the URL that loads the code. The author comments: 'What is interesting about this approach - when we reach final release stage - is that any website that adds this small snippet of code to their pages will have their visitors working on the problem for the duration of their visit to the site'."

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Oh, lovely, distributed Javascript computing by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-31 11:25 · Score: 5, Interesting

Perhaps we could tie this to some sort of micropayment system. You come do distributed work on my website, and you get to view it. Some third party pays me for the cycles, and I have a new revenue stream!