Yee-hah! Congratulations (and enjoy the $1000 check!)
So what did you do interesting cryptographically in the crack,
other than coordinating a bunch of workstations?
Was it just brute force with well-tuned code?
Given the figures in your press release, it sounds like you
tested about 350 billion keys out of a trillion possible,
so you hit the winner a shade early. That's about 400,000 keys/sec/box.
Are the machines mostly Pentiums, Alphas, Suns, etc.?
At 03:59 PM 1/28/97 -0800, Ian Goldberg
EXPORTABLE CRYPTOGRAPHY TOTALLY INSECURE: CHALLENGE CIPHER BROKEN IMMEDIATELY
January 28, 1997 - Ian Goldberg, a UC Berkeley graduate student, announced today that he had successfully cracked RSA Data Security Inc.'s 40-bit challenge cipher in just under 3.5 hours. .... Goldberg used UC Berkeley's Network of Workstations (known as the NOW) to harness the computational resources of about 250 idle machines. This allowed him to test 100 billion possible "keys" per hour --
# Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)