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Distributed.net Does CSC
The fine folks over at Distributed.net have appraised me of the fact that the long awaited CSC clients have been rolled out, as of a few hours ago. The full details went out on the mailing list recently regarding CSC and the new clients. Upgrade your clients, because they'll start serving keys in just a couple hours, and we can keep Team Slashdot in first place.
Yes, more clients to try and crack codes!
Ah, the last peanut -- overflowing with the oil and salt of its departed brothers. -Homer
Are there any other projects like distributed.net out there? (P.S. FP!!)
Check out George Woltman's links to distributed computing projects. This is not a comprehensive list, but includes most of the famous math/science related projects out there.
Is there any estimate on how long this is going to take? DES-III took some 72hrs I think and that was a 56bit encryption... Are there any pages with more information on the CS-Crypt algorithm?
:-) (yay it gets some 78kk/s on RC5 ... RS4000 processor yay!)
All the more reason to get off yer lazy butts and update your client! the contest gets online tomorrow! I've updated mine... and added my little Indy to the mix
--onyx--
*groan* distributed.net has been running closed clients for awhile now. What I wouldn't give to know what makes those things tick. Well, time for a shameless plug... a friend of mine (and myself!) are working on a program that has some rather, ummm, interesting features. Namely it's distributed processing (hence the post under this thread!). What makes it cool is that a) we're releasing it under GPL, and b) has never been done before.
You see, my friend has thrown some genetic programming together with some math syntax checking / validation and created a novel program that can reverse-engineer algorithms. You give it the inputs you fed the "black box" and the output(s) it produced, and it divines what algorithm was used to do it. You can immediately see the benefits here. So I thought I'd plug it - it's a helluva lot more flexible than distributed.net (anybody can run a server - you got the source!), it's free, and it may be one of the first so-called 'software patents' to be licensed under GPL (as soon as I have some spare $$$, I might just do that too!). Oh yes... did I mention we're cooking some algorithms right now that'll hopefully let you find primes on a linear timescale instead of exponential? *evil grin* Noooo Mr. NSA... that's not *my* algorithm.... =)
If anybody's interested in pitching in, we could use a few extra hands getting the code all nice and prrrty and out into the hands of fellow slashdotters. =) mail me!
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Linux clients should be about tonight as well. Lets not forget the winning keycrackers takes the entire prize!
As of the time of this post (04:00UTC), we're just about to hit 200Mkey/second. We've completed a little over .007% of the keyspace. Although this seems very slow, it's an amazing start for a project with clients that we just released. At this point, we've distributed thousands of clients, but most won't report back until they've completed ten blocks. I expect the rate to have a huge increase in the next few hours as clients start submitting their first blocks.
Daniel
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Daniel Baker - dbaker@cuckoo.com - dbaker@distributed.net
Feel free to hop on over and check it out.
Daniel
--
Daniel Baker - dbaker@cuckoo.com - dbaker@distributed.net
Is it just me, or do none of the distributed computing projects seem to be OSS? I have a rather odd system in he corner (NeXTstation Color running NeXTstep 3.3) which I'd love to use for distributed computing. However, none of the projects I've seen have a NeXTstep client, and none of them are OSS, so I can't port it myself.
Information and/or suggestions will be appreciated.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Okay... I inserted my foot firmly into my mouth there. But still, I'm looking forward to doing this via the GPL - I think it'll be a blast.. even if the whole thing fails miserably due to some of the problems you outlined on the link you provided. =) May my code compile cleanly, my fingers move deftly, and the whole thing segfault quickly.
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According to the announcement page, there is a 10,000 euro reward for cracking the CSC challange. Would that mean if we win we get the euros? Or do they convert it to US dollars for us?
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http://savethelaptop.zzweb.com/: Tips and programs for protecting your laptop
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
I've put a rate clock up for this contest. It refreshes every two minutes and is continually updated by the master keyserver. Stats don't get any more accurate than this...
What the hell! There is no mac version available!!
It's always the same thing...
What the hell!! There is no client for the LinuxPPC system!! DAmnit...
Woohoo. Uhm, pretty soon there will be an article in here about how the check is being handed over to me, cause i'm gonna crack it and win those euros... probably not, but you can dream, right? Anyway, join team #10690 or the donkeys will come get you.
Maybe I'm the only person who thinks so, but to me, brute force compromise of 56 bit keys proves absolutely nothing at this point. Everyone knows that a 56bit keyspace can be searched in a relatively short period of time -- big shit -- so what? What are you proving that's not already well understood. How about an algorithmic attack? Otherwise distributed.net stands as the biggest coordinated waste of CPU time. At least SETI has some productive goal.
Www.dcypher.net is offering the full 10k to the winner. WE also have clients that are ~2x faster.
Unfortunatly linux clients wont be out till later tonight.
www.dcypher.net
Chris Harrison
Almost every game available has been cracked, it's not that hard to reverse engineer software obviously.
I am somewhat disappointed that the folks running d.net continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. First, and in my eyes worst, is the fact that they are not able to advertise their contests worth a damn. Take a look at their home page. The announcement of the CSC contest starting is after several paragraphs of numbing boredom, in the same typeface as everything else. Distributed.net needs to learn to use the H1 tag. If they want people to switch their clients, they need a big, flashing siren or something!
The second problem is one that I'm sure a slashdotter with more time than I have will cover more thoroughly here. In short, the clients need to be opened. If you must obfuscate the block authentication scheme, then you have no authentication scheme to speak of. The poor design of d.net client security has been demonstrated by multiple occassions of people faking results. One principle of security is that you should always assume that the attacker knows exactly how your security mechanism works. It would be great if d.net could overcome this problem and harness communal brainpower for testing, bugfixing, and enhancement. Think of open source as a distributed.net for brains :)
-jwb
It says on their page that the CS-Cipher supports 0 bit keys! Woo hoo, no bothersome password to remember! Someone should patent that!
...what do you mean plaintext is prior art?
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm currently running rc5des. I just installed the new CSC client. Does this totally REPLACE rc5des? Or am I abandoning the rc5 project for a new CSC project?
Thanx for enlightening me.
I'm only going to comment on the first point, as you've brought up precisely what I am now responsible for at distributed.net.
You're absolutely right. And we're working to fix it.
We've finalized a redesign of our web site and are beginning a complete rewrite of nearly all of our web content. After the major pages are finished, we'll go to work on the documentation, which is very lacking, often in some extremely important areas. The site will have a new hierarchial structure, with simple URLs for news, help, and downloads. Deep information will be even more readily accessible for those diehards who want it.
The changes will be rolling out in stages over the next thirty days.
Come back to distributed.net in a month's time. I promise, you won't be disappointed.
No, actually you can stop chewing on that foot. Much of the client is still closed-source. Here are the reasons they give (on the same page linked from above):
Why is distributed.net still closed-source?
Although we are providing all of the code linked on this page for public perusal, it is still necessary to keep select portions of the codebase unavailable for general distribution. Indeed, this is an aspect of our operations that we would very much like to be able to eliminate. However, there are several motivating arguments against open-source development with the current clients:
Thankfully, they realize that client-side security is no security at all, and appear to be working on a server-side authentication method.
I admit, it would be very nice to have the complete code-- especially for people experimenting on bizarre high-end hardware. At one time I was very interested in building an HP-PA 2.0 version of the client, but alas the source was not to be had. I also had some PowerPC 620 system running AIX which could have been used-- note the distinct lack of any AIX clients this time.
Here's to hoping that either:
or...
Should I switch to dnetc?
Which contest gives me the best chance of winning?
In other words, for which client is (Keyrate)/(Total Keyspace) Higher?
Why isn't mine moving very fast then? I've been running the thing for almost 15 minutes, and have only 5 periods. On RC5, I'd have 8 or 9 now. I figured that CSC would move faster. Are the blocks bigger?
Wow.. in the minute it took me to write this, it went up to 310.38. Moving right along.
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
Signal 11 spends far too much time posting on Slashdot to produce anything that might actually be useful.
And if anyone noticed, they haven't had the regular single CPU version up for MONTHS! I now have to use the MP capable one. If I am out of the room on startup, the warning message that it may not run correctly on my system stays until I return. I guess I should just find a copy of an older client. But I don't get why they seemed to have abandoned the Mac clients. Maybe because they were jealous of team Evangelista?
Aargh, this is annoying. I mean, I heard rumours that the beta client was a little slowish, but I just benchmarked the d.net CSC client on my machine, and I got about 380.4kkeys/sec cracking rate (it's a K6-2-300).
... ummm, I guess it's only fair that I link to DCypher, as they're kinda the underdog here and not as many people know about them.
It there a problem with some systems, software-wise, or is there a bug in the d.net implementation of CSC? I tried out the DCypher.net CSC client (it's been out for a week or so, I think) and for 732.6kkeys/sec on the same system, under the same circumstances!
Actually, I checked and I'm finding similar comparisons from various people I know, with d.net's CSC client being about half as fast in cracking compared to DCypher.net's (a friend of mine tried both on an Athlon-650 and got 2,023,437keys/sec for DCypher and 1,040,189.47keys/sec for d.net, for example).
My testing is being done with all programs except the shell and systray (and a dos box, as I'm using the command line clients) closed and out of memory.
Is this an optimization issue? Will d.net release improved clients in a few days? I'm really getting worried and annoyed. I had planned to do a DCypher-CSC/d.net-CSC comparison on my website to show which was faster on which of a variety of cpu cores. But this is insane!
Oh
-JC
PC News'n'Links
http://www.jc-news.com/pc
One of my favorite definitions, especially the storage aspect:
2. Base one. A number base with only one digit, namely zero, and which can therefore only be used to express the number zero. Attempting to add one to zero results in an infinite sequence of carries. Numbers in unary notation can be represented particularly efficiently however since each digit requires no storage.
(1998-07-29)
Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-1999 Denis Howe
I suppose this is a joke, but it doesn't make much sense to me. For example,
:-)
0 = 0
00 = 1
000 = 2
0000 = 3
...
or,
0 = 0
00 = -1
000 = 1
0000 = -2
00000 = 2
...
so you can represent any natural number with a modicum of effort..it is however, not very efficient
The biggest selling point for most of my friends who allow me to install the rc5des client (now known as dnetc) on their machines has in the past been the funky little cow. WHERE'S MY COW!!!! I WANT MY COW!!!!! How am I supposed to tell people about the cute cow that cracks crypto if the COW ISN'T THERE??? sure - we got a funky little blue thing, but its not cute, not cuddly, and my girlfriend will hate it! Come on D.net, GIVE US THE COW!
On the plus side, run length encoding kicks ass in base zero!
On the minus side, null-terminated strings suck. And terminating everything else is pretty bad too. So find an OS that supports files, and store your numbers in separate files. I'm sure a work-around will be out shortly, but don't switch from your Turing machines just yet...
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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I've lost track of the number of nights I've pondered porting the RC5 client to Mac OS X, or AltiVec (er, "velocity engine"). But there is no source for the RC5 clients, so my machines get rebooted to Mac OS 8.6 every night when I go home to crunch RC5 at about 1300kk/s ea.
Sorta sad.
(BTW- don't tell me to email them to get on the porting team. I want to putz with it when I have 5 minutes. I don't want to have to join a group.)
Interesting... I extracted the new client (under Windows 98), and it took over a minute to extract, with 100% CPU usage, jerky mouse, and no HDD activity. I finally figured out that it was the F-PROT (F-STOPW) that was the culprit. It reported no error, didn't detect anything, and didn't even report it as suspicious, just took over a minute to check it. Weird.
So anyone running a virus checker, don't be surprised if copying/extracting the file takes forever, and you may want to set your virus checker to ignore it once you have checked it in the first place. Especially if you use F-STOPW.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I just installed the client (Win32 version) and gave it an hour or so running with virtually nothing else running on my system. I'm getting about 660,000 keys per second on my PIII 450 @ 600MHz. This is with the default client options, mainly processor priority at "0" (at idle). What kind of speed are your systems cracking at? What system configurations? I think it's interesting comparing rates...
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Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Ok, first note that I am so far from being a lawyer that it's rather humorous. Oh, and also note that I didn't think of this idea myself; it came from this rather fascinating article in Salon a couple months back. (Yes, it made /. at the time, but only as an update to an article about a new Beowulf for running GP.) And, yes, this is very offtopic.
/. links to seem to be precisely the opposite.)
But basically, the idea is this:
1. A prerequisite for an idea to be patented is that it's not obvious, even to the best experts in the field. That is, there needs to be some flash of creativity involved--some something that no one else can be expected to think of. This is why patents are supposed to be in the public's best interest--better to have the ability to use the idea in a "limited" amount of time (currently 95 years and counting) than to potentially never have anyone else think of it again. In the case of a patent on an algorithm (which covers just about any software patent), it's not enough that the problem the patent solves be novel--indeed, it should be relatively obvious; what needs to contain that unique insight is the algorithm itself. (Yes, this is how it's supposed to work, even though just about all the absurd patents
2. A good genetic programming environment--like this one, if it becomes successful--will theoretically be able to come up with an algorithm that implements any "solution" one would feed into it. A great one would even find an *optimized* solution. (Indeed, in the Salon article, it talks about genetic programs which have produced algorithms or schematics identical to 21 existing patents, and one which even lead to the discovery of a new rule in quantum theory!)
3. A computer program, even one that implements genetic programming, is a mechanical process. It is entirely deterministic, and can be simulated by anyone, assuming they have the CPU resources (especially if the program's open source!). Thus, anything this program thinks up cannot possibly be "nonobvious"; a nonintelligent computer just came up with it.
4. Thus, any algorithm this program can duplicate is nonpatentable. It may even be that any old patent this program can duplicate without specific knowledge should be retroactively unpatented, since if it's "obvious" now, it had to have been obvious then; that is, if the machine is not true AI (which of course this isn't), then it's not intelligent always; it's not like it can be "intelligent by 1950's standards but not by today's".
So...an interesting strategy to fight evil software patents. And indeed, perhaps to fight all patents, although of course it's much less obvious how to get a computer to create a non-software process.
Of course, it'll prolly be a ways off before a genetically created algorithm nullifies a patent. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if some time surprisingly soon, the entire idea of patents is very substantially curtailed, if not eliminated, due to this sort of thing...
Just read the distributed.net mailing list. They're working on an AltiVec core for RC5 (triples keyrate on a G4!) and hard at work on the CSC core too. The main problem seems to me is that there is a new Mac programmer now who's kind of rewriting everything from scratch, which takes quite a while...
Just installed the client and it looks like it prioritizes CSC over RC5. I assume that means while CSC is not completed it will completeley halt RC5 on my machine? I don't want that! How many new Slashdot team members get suckered into this default setting? We're gonna be stomped by Anandtech that way :((
You won't see any euro notes or change in europe, it's just a base currency used to freeze the european currencies (just like SDR for worldwide GSM operators).
The first 'real' euros should show up in 2001 or 2002.
Do you think d.net gives you a wallet full of dollars if you win their challenge ?? NO ! You get a check, and any bank in the world will accept checks in nearly ANY currency.
So your question was pointless. and stupid.
maybe you should aknowledge this one day ...
This isn't cast in stone, but we would most likely convert it to US$, since there would most likely be a 10kEuro check made out to us, and then we would split the prize 60/20/10/10 to the charity voted for by the participants/distributed.net itself/the user who finds the key/that users team (if the user is not on a team, they get 20%).
If the winning user or team were located in Europe, we might ask CS if they'd be willing to send checks directly to them.
Decibel
distributed.net Controller
decibel@distributed.net
sorry, I'm 76 on the Slashdot seti team and I'm not giving up any cycles ;)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Any word on when a MacOS/PPC client will be available? The client list seems a lot shorter than distributed's list for rc5/des, but this seems like one particular glaring omission.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
...and still beat dnet to the punch by a good couple of days. CMON! This is nuts...dnet has turned into a slow blumbering entity that never gets anything done! BTW, if you double the keyrate of all the clients, it gets done in half the time. Your network is already prepared, it accepts 50,000 people's rc5 blocks every day....like it would take that much effort to let it accept 50,000 people's cscs... All those months waiting, and we get a SLOW client?! PLEASE. BTW, quite a few of us are only in it for the 'specs'...the musclecar people. We want SPEED, and we want to blow by the next guy. Its hard to want to do anything when you can jump ship, get 100% the $ (not 20%) and work twice as fast?! I've run rc5 for a long damn time, and gotten a good damn bit of blocks for my team. But I doubt I'll ask the team to switch to csc on dnet. Since all the lumbering giant teams own the rc5 stats, I might just get them to jump ship to decypher though, where we can get better than 1000th place... What a sad situation.
> I've lost track of the number of nights I've pondered porting the RC5 client to Mac OS X, or AltiVec
-sigh-
http://www.distributed.net/source/
Download it, and "putz" with it when you have 5 minutes.
The strange thing is, this is my second post on this and Daa and dbaker have also pointed this out. Some wanker even pasted parts of that page here.
How long do we have to hear "I would port it, but those d.net people wont release the cores!"
The only thing we don't release is the buffer and networkprotocol, for reasons stated in this post.
<grub> Reading
Hahahahaha, i can't stop laughing You are too funny. Wow
SETI refuse to optimize their clients for 4-10 times faster computation speed. Hence some "unauthorized" SETI patchs appeared and they can at least triple your SETI WU process speed. It's quite apparent that once you get enough free help, efficency is no longer an issue in priority.
I run d.net clients on about 25 workstations that are normaly idle, and i run the client with a nice of 20. So its not like the other programs are missing out on CPU time. I have a better chance of winning some cash with my workstations running d.net then i do of finding ET if they where running SETI.
I'm the friend Signal 11 mentioned who wrote Lightbulb. Right now, it doesn't factor primes. I have no plan to make it do so.
Its purpose is to take a list of the inputs and outputs of any unknown function, and find that function given those inputs and outputs. I figured it would be interesting to find the equation that maps these numbers: (1,2),(2,3),(3,5),(4,7)... Once an equation like this had been found, anybody could find the xth prime instantly by running x through the equation. Not only would the results of such a function be useful, but the function itself might give a mathematicians deeper insights into math.
Another mapping of numbers that I thought could hold some promise is (1,3)(2,1),(3,4),(4,1),(5,5),(6,9) -- the digits of pi.
Aside from these great mystery patterns, lightbulb could be of use for everyday data analysis by physicists.
I'd like to mention that the core of this software has already been written, and it works. The devil is in the distributed-computing details, however.
We'll keep you all posted on the status of the project, and if anyone wants to help, email me at 3nelsons@pressenter.com
Today is my first day at using any distributed cracking client. I found out about it here on /. today, and think that it's a realy cool idea. That said: Dcyper may be 2x faster, but isn't it more likely that the distributed.net effort will be more successful (without optimizing the client to equivalent speeds even)? My reasoning: 1) More people are aware of d.net 2) Being a new "member", I'm more inclined to go with the team/effort that has proven that they can do it (3 previous victories). So without any of the problems of the past (of which i am not aware) taken into consideration, wouldn't the new user (or even the seasoned veteran) tend to trust d.net over the other guy? Just curious.
And you wonder why other efforts spring up and try to eat your bread? Looks like d.net finally became the Microsoft of distributed computing.
That doesn't make sense to me... not according to the definition of appraise at www.m-w.com or www.dict.org...
Its purpose is to take a list of the inputs and outputs of any unknown function, and find that function given those inputs and outputs.
aka interpolation
I figured it would be interesting to find the equation that maps these numbers: (1,2),(2,3),(3,5),(4,7)... Once an equation like this had been found, anybody could find the xth prime instantly by running x through the equation.
hmm. well, the straightforward way to do this would be to start with the first 50 or so points (1,2),(2,3),(3,5)... and interpolate a function from them. then test the function starting at the 51st point until a result is given that is not prime. then interpolate a new function based on all the points up to but not including the one that produced the non-prime result. repeat until no non-prime results are returned. of course, ive not seen your program so i cant say this is how it works.
the frequency of non-prime results should eventually dwindle down close to 0 as the functions generated become more accurate. aside from the fact that verifying "primality" can take a while for big numbers, the other issue is that theres really no way to tell whether there we'll be no non-prime results for a given equation.
although, even a semi-acurate equation for pi, e, primes, etc would still be interesting (to me anyway).
--Siva
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DCTI has been jawing about a better authentication scheme (read: getting one) for years. It was being discussed when I "joined" DCTI some year(s) ago. Maybe they'll "invent" public key crypto in a few years. *grin* I don't know what they may be scheming over in the inner circle since I've not been part of that circle for some time now.
:-) As long as the OSes that the majority of people are using have clients, then what's the push to support 10 machines? (and then the client for that obscure OS doesn't get updated for a year...)
As for odd client builds, one of the coders needs the hardware/OS to get a client built. They usually will not "login and build a client" on the fly -- it's way to easy for the host to snag the source that way. When I had access to the full sources, I'd build a client on everything I could get it copied onto -- to date, I think I'm still the only one with a multithreaded SCO client
Having seen the source code, you're not really missing anything. The code that actually does the work is publically available. As for the buffer and network code, who cares; that stuff is pretty easy to whip together. The only magic is the "crypto" used for the block storage. (it's about as much crypto as CSS is and far simpler. I'm really surprised someone has reverse engineered it yet. I shudder to think what will happen when someone does and publishes it.)
The only magic is the "crypto" used for the block storage.
As the one who wrote that particular piece of code... I can say it's not worthy of being called crypto. It was never ment to be.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
No finite polynomial with rational coefficient can take on only and every prime value. The proof of this is elementary. Rather surprisingly, there is a real number C such that C^3^n is always prime for all n [cf Mills' Theorem]. Unfortunately, the only known way to calculate C is working backward from a list of primes...
er...right. thats what i was saying. interpolation may get you something, but never everything.
Mills' Theorem sounds interesting...
--Siva
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Offtopic: Hey /.! What's with the space in the text of the A tag? I didn't put it there.