There's been remarkably little discussion about the DES II contest sponsored by RSA labs. On the 13th, RSA will post another DES challenge, again with a $10,000 prize. There's a new wrinkle: while the prize is still being given to the first person who reports the key, the size of the prize dwindles as time goes by. It's $10k for the first 540 hours (about 3 weeks), then drops to $5k for the next 540, then $1000, and after 1620 hours drops to 0. Next June RSA will release another challenge, with the same prize; however the time limits will ratchet down depending on how fast the key is discovered this time around. Details are at www.rsa.com I've heard of only one organized group which plans to attack it; the one based at www.distributed.net This is the same group which successfully brute forced 56 bit RC5 encryption. My educated guess, based on the speed with which they are currently searching RC5-64 (about 11 Gkey/sec) and the known speed differences between RC5 and DES searching, is that they have a good but not certain chance of finding the key within the $10,000 window. [Interesting factoid - at that speed they could crack 40 bit RC5 keys at better than one a minute.] If you have cycles to spare, you might consider joining for the DES attack. Their clients are quite good, and do not interfere with normal operations. If you don't want to trust d.n's organizers, consider running Svend Mikkelsen's Bryddes for x86 processors. It's quite a bit faster than my DESKR, and full source is available. Peter Trei trei@ziplink.net