Distributed.net
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- The correct title of this article is distributed.net. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
distributed.net (or Distributed Computing Technologies, Inc. or DCTI) is a world-wide distributed computing effort that is attempting to solve large scale problems using otherwise idle CPU time. It is officially recognized as a non-profit organization under U.S. tax code 501(c)(3).
Currently, distributed.net is working on RC5-72 (breaking RC5 with a 72-bit key)[1], and the OGR-25 project[2], which is searching for 25 point optimal Golomb rulers. The OGR project has an expected completion date at current rates of several years (and the rate is increasing), while RC5-72 has an expected completion date of about 1,000 years (and the rate is decreasing). Both problems are part of a series— OGR is part of an infinite series; RC5 currently has eight unsolved challenges from RSA.
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[edit] History
A coordinated effort was started in February 1997 by Earle Ady and Christopher G. Stach II of Hotjobs.com and New Media Labs fame, as an effort to break the RC5-56 portion of the RSA Secret-Key Challenge, a 56-bit encryption algorithm that had a $10,000 USD prize available to anyone who could find the key. Unfortunately, this initial effort had to be suspended as the result of SYN flood attacks by participants upon the server.[3]
A new independent effort, named distributed.net, was later coordinated by Jeff Lawson in March 1997 to resume the effort. The RC5-56 challenge was solved on October 19, 1997 after 250 days.[4]
The next project was the RC5-64 challenge which took nearly five years to complete before the correct key (0x63DE7DC154F4D039) was found on July 14, 2002 decrypting the message to the plaintext "some things are better left unread".[5]
[edit] Miscellanea
A cow head is used as the icon of the application and is the project's mascot. Its use is explained on the site's FAQ.[6]
"Dnetc" is the name of the program which users run to complete the challenges.
The software is available for a large number of platforms, and is a command line program with an interface to configure it.
x86/Win32 is the most used configuration, with PPC/OS X in second place, and x86/Linux in third place as of March 2006.[7]
[edit] Official projects
- Current
- Optimal Golomb Rulers (OGR-25) — In progress
- RSA Lab's 72-bit RC5 Encryption Challenge — In progress
- Cryptography
- RSA Lab's 56-bit RC5 Encryption Challenge — Completed 19 October 1997 (after 250 days and 47% of the key space tested).
- RSA Lab's 56-bit DES II-1 Encryption Challenge — Completed 24 February 1998 (after 39 days)
- RSA Lab's 56-bit DES II-2 Encryption Challenge — Ended 17 July 1998 (found independently by EFF's Deep Crack custom DES cracker after 2.5 days)
- RSA Lab's 56-bit DES-III Encryption Challenge — Completed 19 January 1999 (after 22.5 hours with the help of EFF's Deep Crack custom DES cracker)
- CS-Cipher Challenge — Completed 16 January 2000 (after 60 days and 98% of the key space tested).
- RSA Lab's 64-bit RC5 Encryption Challenge — Completed 14 July 2002 (after 1757 days and 83% of the key space tested).[4]
- Other
- Optimal Golomb Rulers (OGR-24) — Completed 13 October 2004 [8]
[edit] See also
- RSA Secret-Key Challenge
- DES Challenges
- Brute force attack
- Cryptanalysis
- Key size
- List of distributed computing projects
[edit] References
- ^ RC5-72 project page. distributed.net.
- ^ OGR project page. distributed.net.
- ^ "Macho Computing at Root of RSA Contest Flap", Wired, 1997-03-03.
- ^ a b distributed.net History & Timeline. distributed.net.
- ^ distributed.net completes rc5-64 project list announcement (txt). distributed.net (2002-09-26).
- ^ What's with all the cows?. distributed.net.
- ^ RC5-72 / CPU Participation. distributed.net.
- ^ Plan entry by Greg Hewgill (2004-11-01).
