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Probable Solution Found for ECC2-109 Challenge

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the waiting-for-the-photo-finish dept.

kpearson writes "The eCompute ECC2-109 distributed computing project discovered a probable solution to Certicom's ECC2-109 challenge today. The challenge was to defeat a 109-bit Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC). Since the eCompute ECC2-109 project began on November 8, 2002, 1,981 volunteers have run the project's software and found almost 40.5 million distinguished points. From those points the project found two which matched and caused a collision, enabling the project to find a solution to the ECC. The solution was submitted to Certicom this morning for verification."

6 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Really hard to understand for someone by tomstdenis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Like the RC5 challenges [and DES before it] just to say "yes, yes you can do this".

    So when someone says "64-bits of security ought to be enough" you can say "no, no it isn't." ;-)

    Though yeah, if they do more challenges it's just getting futile.

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  2. Re:Really hard to understand for someone by after · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But does this have any use? Prize money for what? For being lucky enough to get some random number twice? I didnt read teh full description, so I dont really know if there is reale use for this, but from what the Introduction tells me: "We are getting a ton of computers to generate numbers, and if two computers generate the same number, then we win." Hmm, huh? I still dont see what the point of this is? Does this advance some sort of research? Does this support some other principal of theory?

  3. Re:Really hard to understand for someone by cyb97 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It proves that it is possible with commodity hardware (and a lot of time) to break ciphers that are regarded as pretty strong.

    This ofcourse is nothing to what one can imagine that national agencies have at their disposal. If a gang of internetusers can break a cipher (brute forcing it) using spare cpu-cycles, imagine what a dedicated cluster of highend computers using an algorithm more efficient than bruteforcing it would be.

  4. Re:Really hard to understand for someone by bofkentucky · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Last time I checked, the Brits had a implementation of RSA long befor R, S, and A did, it just happened to be classified. Polish mathmeticians broke enigma in what 30, 31? Didn't help them much, but their techniques trained the first generation of computer cryptographers (Turing included). There was no point in having the listening/intercept nets that the US, England, and the former USSR maintained during the cold war had and China and the US have today if all you get to listen to was essentially white noise.

    There are advantadges and disadvantadges to this though, Bin Laden was supposedly tracked to Tora Bora b/c he was using a "failed" brit military scheme, but, Just like with Soviet nuke engineers, there are very good cryptanalysts/cyrtographers for hire out there, and stable, 1st world nations occasionally get outbid for their services.

    --
    09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
  5. Re:Waste of cycles by Drakonian · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, because only a few trillion dollars in transactions are protected every day by encryption schemes. Nothing much at stake there.

    --
    Random is the New Order.
  6. Re:Waste of cycles by gumpish · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why spend millions of mips-hours cracking 64-bit encryption when much stronger encryption is available?

    And isn't it trivial to calculate the probability of a solution being found when using a known alogrithm and expending a certain amount of CPU time?

    What is learned?