$10,000 DES challenge starting! (retry)

Trei Family (trei@ziplink.net)
Sun, 12 Jul 1998 22:49:37 -0500

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I'd like to remind people that Monday, July 13th,
1998, RSA Data Security is releasing the challenge
data for the next RSA DES Challenge (the brute force
solution of a DES encrypted message).

For more information on this challenge, please see
http://www.rsa.com. The prize stands at 10,000 USD
for the first solution found within 10 days.

If wish to attempt the challenge by yourself, I
reccomend that you look at Svend Mikkelsen's
Bryddes (http://inet.uni2.dk/~svolaf/des.htm),
which is by far the fastest Intel implementation
I know of - considerably better than my own
Deskr.

If you're interested in a joint effort, you could
do worse than look at http://distributed.net. This
group won the RC5-56 and January 1998 DES challenges,
and are currently working on RC5-64. Their clients
will automatically switch over to DES Monday
morning. It looks like they should attain around
86 billion keys/second, which will exhaust the
keyspace in under 10 days. However, only a fraction
of the prize money goes to the person who finds
the key.

Cracking DES in these challenges serves a higher
purpose than winning a prize or gaining bragging
rights.

Single DES (the kind used in this challenge) is the
strongest general purpose encryption which Americans
are currently permitted to send overseas without
special and rarely granted waivers.

As a result, the US government is turning over the
world market in high quality cryptography to
non-US firms, with a cost of billions of dollars a
year to the US economy, thousands of American jobs,
and increased crime and terrorism resulting from the
poor security this policy promotes.

Demonstrating how vulnerable US 'export quality'
encryption actually is creates pressure to remove
those restrictions entirely.

I regard this as a desirable goal.

Peter Trei
trei@ziplink.net

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