Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 14:08:10 -0600 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Scott Schram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> A partnership between Distributed.net and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has successfully decoded a DES message encrypted as a challenge by RSA, demonstrating that DES is not secure. http://www.distributed.net http://www.rsa.com "You don't have to work all day long to break DES Press announcement soon!" http://www.eff.org "EFF's DES Cracker makes headlines again! Working with Distributed.Net, our machine was the winner of RSA's DES-III Challenge (DES Cracker accounted for 80mil. of the total Distributed.Net 220mil. keys per second) - press release forthcoming (Jan. 19, 1999)" and >From http://www.distributed.net (Since it's difficult to get on there right now:) --------------------------------------------------- It is with considerable excitement (and quite a bit of relief) that I can now announce that the DES-III contest is officially ended. At 07:15 am PST (14:15 UTC), just about the time when we all started getting worried about the 24-hour waypoint, the solution to DES-III arrived. The winning key, 92 2C 68 C4 7A EA DF F2, revealed the plaintext message: The unknown message is: See you in Rome (second AES conference, March 22-23, 1999 The winning key was found by EFF's Deep Crack hardware, and submitted to the distributed.net servers immediately. RSA confirmation of the success followed shortly thereafter. It's truly been a joy and a thrill to work with John Gilmore and the other talented and clued people at EFF. Were it not for their contributions to distributed.net, the 24-hour deadline would have been a much more difficult goal to reach. I'll be running stats for the partial 19-Jan work up to the point of success and posting them this afternoon for the archives. More details will follow soon as the dust settles, RSA is planning a 12:00 noon PST announcement at the RSA '99 Convention. Both John Gilmore and our own Peter Gildea will be in attendance. Here's a few statistics on our aggregate success: Start of contest: January 18, 1999 at 09:00 PST End of contest: January 19, 1999 at 07:15 PST Elapsed Time: 22 hours 15 minutes Percentage Complete: 22.2% Size of keyspace: 72,057,594,037,927,936 Keys Tested: 16,017,142,616,948,736 Blocks Tested: 29,834,253 Overall Keyrate: 199 Gkeys/sec Peak Keyrate: 250 Gkeys/sec --
