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Crack the Code and Win a Million Bucks

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the mod-everything-by-2 dept.

JS_RIDDLER noted a Toronto Star article about a sort of contest to crack some encryption and win a million bucks. The article is a bit fluffy, but it getst the point across... we wasted all those RC5 keys ;)

3 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. RSA vs ECC by noelp · · Score: 5, Informative
    For those of you who are suprised at the number of bits needed to secure data using ECC compared to RSA, a good discussion can be found here

    http://www.cs.uct.ac.za/courses/CS400W/NIS/papers0 0/mlesaoan/paper.html

    --
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  2. Fallacy by savagedome · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the guru Bruce Schneier, Fallacy of cracking contests

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  3. Re:Brute force by Entrope · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was slightly worried that this would be what Bruce Schneier calls "doghouse crypto" -- if you use it, you belong in the doghouse. The kind of companies that sell doghouse crypto usually don't say what algorithm they use, they usually use a "proprietary" (non-critically-reviewed) algorithm, and they usually don't have nearly enough knowledge to do a good review themselves. Fortunately, it's ECC, which is well known and well reviewed.

    Elliptic Curve Cryptography is, like RSA and Unix crypt, believed to be hard because it looks like a one-way door: It is easy to go in one direction, but unless you have exactly the right data (or an obscene amount of time), impossible to go in the other direction.

    Classic Unix crypt is limited by its key size to 56 bits, which makes it practical for a dedicated attack to break. RSA is limited by its structure to use keys that are related to large prime numbers; prime numbers are relatively rare. ECC shares neither of those limitations, so you get a lot more bang from your bits.