Crack the Code and Win a Million Bucks

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 ;)

Comments

Re:I read this and wonder about UNIX

[jamie]

You did the math wrong. Assuming you're right about there being 92 chars usable in each char of a password, the number of possible 8-char passwords is 92**8, not 92*8. Put another way, you get 6.52 bits per character, or 52.19 bits total:

$ perl -le 'print log(92)*8/log(2)'
52.1884956484561

There are obviously a lot more than 736 possibilities -- even if you just use the numbers, you can count from 0 to 99,999,999 :)

Re:I read this and wonder about UNIX

[ncw]

> An 8-character password using 92 possible characters leaves 736 possibilities

Actually it is 92**8 not 92*8 which is 5132188731375616, ie just over 52 bits which - probably good enough...