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INET GROUP BREAKS RC5 48 BIT CRYPTOGRAPHIC CHALLENGE.97

INET GROUP BREAKS RC5 48 BIT CRYPTOGRAPHIC CHALLENGE                 02.21.97
SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING NEWS                                          HPCwire
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  Zurich, Switzerland -- More than 5000 computers connected via the Internet
have broken one of the most difficult cryptographic challenges ever solved,
in just over thirteen days. The challenge was one of a series of such
challenges recently offered by RSA Data Security, Inc., a U.S. firm which
produces cryptographic software.

  A news release from RSA noted that the crack effectively demonstrates that
many encryption systems -- such as those commonly used on the Internet, in
electronic commerce, and in so-called "Smart Cards" -- can be broken with
relative ease using modern computing techniques.

  The challenge was solved by a loosely organized group of individuals from
around the world who banded together to create a project known as the
"Distributed Internet Crack." The group was begun by Germano Caronni, member
at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and quickly grew to
include hundreds of people, from commercial as well as academic sites, who
worked at a furious pace to write and optimize the necessary software and
then run it on thousands of computers simultaneously. The group never met in
person but communicated via email. Continuously updated pages on the
World-wide Web, available in four different languages, provided the latest
information and progress reports.

  The Distributed Internet Crack first attacked the easiest of RSA's
challenges. The group solved this challenge in 3 1/2 hours, only minutes
after another group submitted the correct answer. After coming so close to
winning the first challenge, the group decided to take on the second one,
hundreds of times as difficult. The challenge required that up to
281,474,976,710,656 different keys be checked.

  By linking the computational resources of thousands of computers via the
Internet, the second challenge was solved on Monday, February 10th, a little
over thirteen days after it was issued. The news release asserted that
completion of the challenge broke new ground in several ways: Besides
cracking what it termed "the hardest key ever", the event also brought
together the most computers ever working on a single Internet project (over
5500 computers were operating simultaneously at one point, and over 10,000
computers joined in the project at one time or another), and produced the
most cryptographic keys ever checked per second in an openly publicized
effort (over 440 million keys per second at peak, and an average of 140
million keys per second over the entire project).

  If the group would have re-attacked the 40 bit challenge with the computing
power it had at the end of this effort, that key would have been broken
within 45 minutes. The group is now planning to attempt another challenge
issued by RSA, this time aimed at the DES cipher, which has been used in
American and other financial institutions for many years.

  For more information, see the following URLs. RSA Data Security Secret-Key
Challenges: http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/97challenge/  Team Web Pages:
http://www.klammeraffe.org/challenge/ and
http://www.ee.ethz.ch/challenge/  Software:
ftp://ftp.tik.ee.ethz.ch/pub/projects/dic/  Preliminary Web page for DES
challenge: http://fh28.fa.umist.ac.uk/~des/

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