distributed.net finds the RC-5/64 key after ~4 years

[Testin da Cable]

well, as the title says really. made public yesterday, but found two months ago it seems [bummer ] "winning" host is a PIII450 so I hear, so apparently you don't need a superpoota to crack encryption, just loads and loads of luck.

 

[Damini]

None of what you have said makes one bit of sense to me.

 

[xane]

"winning" host is a PIII450 so I hear, so apparently you don't need a superpoota to crack encryption, just loads and loads of luck. [/B]

Helps if you're in charge of an institution with 4,000 PIII/450 on it

 

[Trem]

As a general rule I shouldn't enter threads where I don't understand the title

 

[Testin da Cable]

Originally posted by Damini
None of what you have said makes one bit of sense to me.

rc5 is a way of hiding something inside something else in a very "secure" fashion. you could think of it as both a lock and a key. imagine writing a message, then putting it in a box, then locking it. kenny finds the box, but it doesn't mean anything to him, and he won't be able to read your note without the proper key. while young kenneth goes insane trying to break into the box, you can watch telly and laugh at him.


course, the best way to pass messages without someone noticing or being able to read them is to make sure that they don't look like messages at all.

 

[xane]

He'll start talking about Bob and Alice in a sec, just ignore him.

 

[prime1]

The worst thing about this, is that it reminds me of my unbeleivably geeky room m8 at school, who had a UNIX box and hated Windows at all costs, had all this crap on his computer and kept telling me how they enver crashed, it was always recoverable cause of "damons" or some shit like that.

Oh how i laughed when his graphics "daemon" crashed and he coudlnt do anything without conencting remotely from another PC. I might have let him use mine, but i wanted to gloat so i made him reboot.

 

[Summo]

You're all nerdy freaks.

The sun is shining today. Did you know that?

 

[Testin da Cable]

the what? oh, you mean that scary burning ball in the blue thing :/

 

[Will]

Originally posted by prime1
Oh how i laughed when his graphics "daemon" crashed and he coudlnt do anything without conencting remotely from another PC. I might have let him use mine, but i wanted to gloat so i made him reboot.

The X-server is evil, evil I tell you.

It hates me

 

[Testin da Cable]

strange really. mine loves me

tell me everything about it in the OS forum matey.
/me feels in a helpful mood today

 

[Shocko]

Mine used to hate me, but now it behaves... Mine had been running non-stop for around 30 days, untill the other day, when my monitor messed up.

My first suspicion was the X server, so i restarted that, which did nothing, so i eyed up the hardware, which has buggered me before, so i rebooted, losing my 55days uptime Of course once the bios test thing came up, and the screen was still messed up, i tried a cold boot, with the same result. Then i realised that it was actually my monitor, which had gone all weird.

If i leave it for a while, it will work normally again, however after around 10-20mins of being on, the screen fucks up again

 

[Will]

Ahh, no point telling you about it in the OS forum, for I am Command-Line Boy. Fear my vim, and my use of the mighty crontab.

I miss graphics sometimes.

 

[prime1]

*hugs Windows*

linux sux! well it dosnt, but it does.

Oh and testin yer explanation of this code thingy is a little confusing and u missed why some1 cracking it was important.

The RC45 blah blah blah code is a very pwoeful form of encryption. Current laws in the US prevent developing any higher level of encryption, for national security reasons. Hwoever the companies or groups who produced this particular encryption have been lobbying the US government to allow them to develop a more powerful encryption tool. The government refused. So their method was this :

If we *crack* the encryption, and make it public knowledge or whatever, then the US will ahve to look to a new more powerful encrytpion system. So they put up a cash reward of £50000 i think, for the first pc to crack the code. They allowed peopel to download a screensaver that when whte pc was idle, would work on cracking the code over a global distributed network (using the internet).

I think theyve kinda destroyed their own argument though, as that code requried hudnreds of thousand sof pcs, millions of computing hours and big fat cash prize at the end in order to crack it.

I could be wrong, but thats how i interpreted the jargon and general rubbish my geek room m8 spewed at me.

 

[Will]

You are pretty much there, or at least as up to speed as me. The point of showing it could be broken is that some people (especially the US government) would like to be able to encrypt files for a good length of time, without having to go back and update them. It might take millions of hours of computer time at the moment, but in 20 years, it might only take a couple of days.

And that would be bad, if you were trying to hide something.

 

[Testin da Cable]

prime: I tried to explain it to Damini in a way that wouldn't bother her with too much background.


and iirc this latest one was a peasly 10k. also you don't need squillions of pcs to do it [if you're very lucky] but it does make it easier.

 

[stu]

Originally posted by Itcheh
It might take millions of hours of computer time at the moment, but in 20 years, it might only take a couple of days...

At which point they'd just legislate for a more complex encryption tool.

imo the whole distributed.net thing just proved what RC5 originally claimed - that it is, *in real world situations*, uncrackable.

 

[Testin da Cable]

indeed. after all nobody trusts to blind luck these days.

 

[legendario]

Originally posted by prime1
that code requried hudnreds of thousand sof pcs

i didn't realise that many people played soldier of fortune.

 

[dysfunction]

Originally posted by Tremor.
As a general rule I shouldn't enter threads where I don't understand the title

I have to agree with you on that one!!

 

[doh_boy]

I always thought that what GCHQ did was the best idea. The encyption that those RSA blokes "invented" was actually first thought of by some Uber mathematician at GCHQ in the '50s but the didn't tell anyone. Who cracks a code they know nothing about?