I'd like to remind people that Monday, July 13th, 1998, RSA Data Security is releasing the challenge data for the next RSA DES Challenge (the brute force solution of a DES encrypted message). For more information on this challenge, please see http://www.rsa.com. The prize stands at 10,000 USD for the first solution found within 10 days. If wish to attempt the challenge by yourself, I reccomend that you look at Svend Mikkelsen's Bryddes (http://inet.uni2.dk/~svolaf/des.htm), which is by far the fastest Intel implementation I know of - considerably better than my own Deskr. If you're interested in a joint effort, you could do worse than look at http://distributed.net. This group won the RC5-56 and January 1998 DES challenges, and are currently working on RC5-64. Their clients will automatically switch over to DES Monday morning. It looks like they should attain around 86 billion keys/second, which will exhaust the keyspace in under 10 days. However, only a fraction of the prize money goes to the person who finds the key. Cracking DES in these challenges serves a higher purpose than winning a prize or gaining bragging rights. Single DES (the kind used in this challenge) is the strongest general purpose encryption which Americans are currently permitted to send overseas without special and rarely granted waivers. As a result, the US government is turning over the world market in high quality cryptography to non-US firms, with a cost of billions of dollars a year to the US economy, thousands of American jobs, and increased crime and terrorism resulting from the poor security this policy promotes. Demonstrating how vulnerable US 'export quality' encryption actually is creates pressure to remove those restrictions entirely. I regard this as a desirable goal. Peter Trei trei@ziplink.net