An announcement forwarded to me (due to being on des-challenge mailing list I think) of proposed organisation for breaking RSADSI's DES challenge. Those interested in participating might wish to join the lists mentioned. In addition the list: des-challenge@muffin.org is for discussion of the DES challenge, and can be subscribed to by sending email to majordomo@muffin.org. -Adam ====================================================================== Subject: Announcement: Organisation Committee From: ths@rz.tu-ilmenau.de (Thomas S.) Date: 15 Feb 1997 18:27:40 +0000 Hi! The six volunteers who answered the call for a committee of management have got together to try to help 'steer' the DES challenge. We have considered the available options of proceeding, and we kindly ask everyone interested in this project to follow our proposals, to avoid waste of efforts. 1. The attempt to break the key will be coordinated. We chose this mainly because we can make a political statement. We don't want it to be a race for money. Each task will be handled by logically separate servers, some of which with be replicated and run as a hierachy. The protocol will use UDP, although there will be gateway servers for other protocols (such as HTTP, SMTP, FAX, etc). We hope that one of the first requests for a key range will be from parties interested in using a "random" approach -- we would appreciate some discussion on how large their ranges should be. 2. There will be one consistent WWW structure for the project. It does not have to managed by a single person. This structure should provide statistics, information for developers, interested users and perhaps even for the press. Several mirrors and translations will be started soon. The starting point is: http://www.des.crypto.org/ [fh28.fa.umist.ac.uk/des/] The url in brackets has to be used till we get the final subdomain. Likewise for the rest of this document. 3. The work of the different groups should be stated and coordinated on the page http://www.des.crypto.org/people.html. [fh28.fa.umist.ac.uk/des/people.html] This is to avoid uncoordinated parallel developmemt. Please write to Thomas S. <webmaster@mail.des.crypto.org> [webmaster@fh28.fa.umist.ac.uk] if you what want to be mentioned on this page. 3a. Several mailing lists have been set up for the different groups: des-coding for the actual DES routine and optimisation des-networking for the network code and protocol des-www for www contributions and mirrors des-pr for press contact, translations etc (like challenge-pr) des-misc :-) des-announce moderated, important information for users of the client List address: <list>@lists.des.crypto.org [@xtn.net] To subscribe, send mail to majordomo@lists.des.crypto.org [@xtn.net] with in the body of the message (several actions allowed): subscribe <list> Achives available (see homepage). 4. The actual DES routine has to be written and optimised. We ask developers to participate and coordinate their efforts using the mailing list des-coding. For obvious reasons, developers outside the USA are prefered, but "publication" of algorithms seems to be a legal way go get around. Please do not use this list to distribute crypto code. 5. The prize money will be split equally between Gutenberg and EFF. There is a possibility of using part of it for stickers or something similar, but don't count on it. We hope to get a working system up and running ASAP. The fact alone that DES is seriously challenged (with a reasonable time frame) should give us quite some publicity (by the time the system is ready). If we can make use of that, we will have significantly more client than for the 48 bit key. The organisation committee: Piete Brooks <Piete.Brooks@cl.cam.ac.uk> Jered Floyd <jered@mit.edu> Tim Newsome <drz@froody.bloke.com> Germano Caronni <caronni@tik.ee.ethz.ch> Thomas Roessler <Thomas.Roessler@sobolev.rhein.de> Thomas S. <ths@fh28.fa.umist.ac.uk>