RC5-64 Success

Peter Trei writes "After over four years of effort, hundreds of thousands of participants, and millions of cpu-hours of work, Distributed.net has brute forced the key to RSA Security's 64 bit encryption challenge, winning a US$10,000 prize. Still outstanding Challenges carry prizes as high as $200,000. RSA's PR release is here. d.net's site has not yet been updated." Update: 09/26 16:59 GMT by CN : The good folks over at SlashNET are having a forum with the distributed.net crew on Saturday at 21:00 UTC. It'll be a great time to meet some of the people who made this possible.

No more RC5 in OpenBSD

[chrysalis]

Funny. The RC5 algorithm has just been removed from OpenBSD because of copyrights.

With apologies to Douglas Adams

[mh_tang]

So tell me, was the answer "42"?

FINALLY.

[KFury]

Does this mean I can go back to alien hunting now?

How crazy is this?

[WalterGR]

From the press release - "a coordinated team of computer programmers and enthusiasts, known as distributed.net, has solved the RC5-64 Secret-Key Challenge."

If you remove a single element - the $10,000 award offered by RSA - then the press release would read more like,

"A group of degenerate hackers [sic] cracked an encryption method owned by RSA Security Inc. The company has contacted law enforcement authorities, and an attempt to track down these hackers [sic] is currently under way. Under the DMCA, these criminals, when caught, faces sentances of up to..."

Re:With apologies to Douglas Adams

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't apply to Douglas Adams, of course.

It does apply to most Slashdot comments, however.

Re:I went through...

[OrangeSpyderMan]

Wow, this stuff blew all those machines and you still want to do it? :-)

Lets see $10,000/1million= :(

[Brigadier]

In further news all participating Distributed.net users will be issued a check for 1 Cent.

Re:Congratulations

[Anonymous Coward]

dude get with the times, @Home folded like a year ago.

Sure, switch to seti...

[Nugget]

You just wait and see who has the last laugh when SETI@home manages to detect an alien signal only to discover that it's rc5 encrypted! :)

LOST: RC5 block crunching machine

[EvilStein]

I left a machine turned on at one of my former jobs, and it's crunching rc5 blocks still.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT IS!

Is there any way to find out where the rogue machine is? heh..
It's submitting about 200 blocks a day. I just wish that I could FIND it...

Re:Sure, switch to seti...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, well we can already do an educated guess of what is says. Something about "BASE".