Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk> writes:
How can this be enforced? The RSADSI DES challenge is open to all comers, and how do you prove that someone who finds the key found it through this group effort?
I have a suspicion many people would be tempted to fill in the RSA challenge form and email it in themselves. $10,000 is a fair amount of money.
Of course they will. If the unsearched portions of the keyspace are published, you can just sit back until the odds go up and then throw some CPU power at it. There is no obligation on the part of the individual who finds the key to not claim the prize personally. The issues of random keyspace assignment to protect against sabotage and centralized monolithic server vs autonomous client have been debated on the "muffin" list, where I have been lurking, but the people in charge seem to like explicit keyspace partitioning and servers a lot. Should be an interesting effort. By the way, does anyone know if des-challenge@muffin.org is alive? I haven't seen any messages from it in over a day and majordomo is not responding to inquiries. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $