Re: Let's form an RC5 cracking team
Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Wed, 17 Sep 1997 11:51:49 -0400
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>
> > > > Check out http://rc5.distributed.net/
> > > >
> > > > I think it would be cool for someone at extropy.org to set up
> > > > an email alias for this. If our team were to crack it, the
> > > I can contribute the use of 5 Pentiums (from 90 to 266Mhz).
>
> You can add four of mine, but I think we can do even better.
> Rather than settling for $1,000 from Bovine, why not go after
> the $10,000 directly? I realize that would take writing our
> own software, and duplicating effort with them a bit, but we've
> got lots of cypherpunks here too and might be able to write
> better software.
>
> If that's too much trouble or less likely to produce the result,
> then getting in on Bovine's deal isn't so bad (for those who
> haven't or cannot check out the page referred to, Bovine is a
> group that wrote software and is coordinating an effort to win
> the $10,000 offered for cracking RSA. For their efforts, they
> will keep $1,000, give $1,000 to the fellow that actually finds
> to contest key (which we are proposing here to donate to Max),
> and the remaining $8,000 to Project Gutenberg).
>
It's an idea, but I don't think we'd be successful. Bovine has
already done about 28% of the keyspace and has enough horsepower
signed up to do about .5% a day right now. If you check out the
top 100 email stats you will see they have some really big guns:
the top team yesterday, evangelist@apple.com averaged 272943.56
kkeys/sec! That is 272943560 keys/sec! My P100 can do something
like 140kkeys/sec max... So unless we get _alot_ of computers
signed up here, I think it's better to take our chances with
the Bovine effort.
--
The future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed.
-William Gibson