"Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com> writes:
I have been wondering about malicious hackers getting into these pools. would it be possible for them to contribute false data that screws up the end results? or are such anomalies easily discarded or disregarded by the final processes?
The latter, for this application -- unlike the straightforward approach to RC4 cracking, the partial relations that contributors find for the factoring exercise are (like the factoring itself) time-consuming to compute but dead simple to check... and, in fact, each of them is checked before accepting it.
it seems to me that in many cases, these collaborative projects virtually cannot check the validity of the supplied data without repeating the computation effort, although there may be good tests that tend to screen out "most" bad data.
Yes, that's a good point and one we hashed around a bit at the beginning of the RC4 project, with less than a perfect conclusion -- but some good ideas. You need to account for several kinds of people, including people plaing with less than a full deck of clues; and the target of the cracking ring allocating and turning in a "not found" report on the actual target part of the space.
future implementors of these programs might amuse themselves with trying to create such safeguards or anticipate such "attacks" which are pretty significant the more the processes become distributed.
Absolutely. Jim Gillogly Trewesday, 25 Astron S.R. 1996, 21:32