At 06:56 PM 1/6/97 -0800, Mike Duvos wrote:
Peter Trei (trei@process.com) writes:
Ick. Why overly complexify things? A known plaintext attack would be far more straightforward. After all, the goal is to recover the key, not the message. Having to find a key which decrypts to something having all high bits clear will discourage people who might want to take a crack at this independent of the canned program you are going to distribute.
I agree. A real life crack of DES can almost always assume a know plain text. Why should the demo crack take the 10% hit?
[snip]
It will NOT run as a screen saver.
Too bad. The screensaver paradigm is something the unwashed masses can easily understand.
I have been running the distributed prime search software (see my .sig) for about two months now. [2^1398269-1 is prime!] If you haven't tried this software, I'd urge you to do so now. Not only because it might make you famous, but because it will give you some ideas how a distributed DES crack might work. I always liked the screen saver idea, but a crack using screen savers only works while the screen saver is active. The mersenne prime program runs on the lowest priority thread under Win95/NT/Linux. It works even while you are working, using all the idle cycles it can find, while at the same time having no effect at all on any of the work you do. Install it and forget about it. It's better than a screen saver. -- Lucky Green mailto:shamrock@netcom.com PGP encrypted mail preferred Make your mark in the history of mathematics. Use the spare cycles of your PC/PPC/UNIX box to help find a new prime. http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm