I remember when RSA129 was being done, the program you have you manually get a start location, and then email transparent any results that it got. The program that doled out areas to search would base those on what had already been mailed in. I don't know the details of how exactly that worked, however.

Not quite. The UIDs that were given out for RSA-129 had nothing to do with the search space. The reason is that RSA-129 did not search for the prime factors; it searched for quadratic residue relations. Moreover, ANY relations within the space is a valid datapoint. As a result, the UIDs ojnly told the factoring clients where to start looking for relations. You can effectively think of it as a seed to a random number generator. So long as everyone has a different seed, they will get different random numbers. Thats what the UIDs did; provided each client with a different starting point. You had to get a new UID for each run of mpqs because starting over with the same uid would re-run all the checks you've already done. Why double-run when UIDs are cheap? You see, unlike the RC4 crack, there was no relation between the UIDs and the relations returned. As the person who wrote the UID returning script, I can tell you that all it did was keep a file with the last UID given, and when an email requests came in, it would create a lock on that file, return the last UID+1 through the number of UIDs requested, and then update the file. There was no basis of the relations received. In fact, the UID responder could have been run on any machine -- it could care less about the data returned.

But, if the program could be written in such a way that it was all automatic, mailing in results and automatically (maybe via a telnet port?) getting the information about what to search, that would be most nice.

The point of runfactor was to allow you to obtain a large segment of UIDs and dole them out locally. Since there wasn't a relation between UID and data returned, then it didn't matter if some UIDs never returned. For RC4, you _have_ to search everywhere. Therefore, you would want to make runfactor an interactive program that contacted a central server whenever it wanted to get some search space. I dont think this would be very hard to write. -derek

I remember when RSA129 was being done, the program you have you manually get a start location, and then email transparent any results that it got. The program that doled out areas to search would base those on what had already been mailed in. I don't know the details of how exactly that worked, however.

Yeah it's quite like that except we're going for sockets, and an SMTP style protocol. That way people can write other apps to the protocol, for instance Andy Brown has an SSL bruter and key management s/w for NT, and he plans to interface to the 'master' software via this socket protocol, allows intermixing, so some people will be running direct IP, others with PCs or behind firewalls will be running via the WWW interface which also talks the SMTP style stuff to the master, and it would be possible if desired to write an email gateway to the socket protocol for interacting with the master. Also the socket protocol (blame Piete for this clever stuff, and most of the socket protocol design) is planned to work with arbitrary levels of masters, so you can start a local master say on your local network, the local master requests keys of the 'big master', and doles them out to 'slaves' running on each cpu you have. When all it's slaves have acked the keyspace it has drawn out from the big master, it'll ack that bigger keyspace with the bigmaster and draw out some more keyspace.

But, if the program could be written in such a way that it was all automatic, mailing in results and automatically (maybe via a telnet port?) getting the information about what to search, that would be most nice.

Yep a telnet port is it for both reporting and getting keys, also the WWW interface to the same.

I'd basicly like to be able to start the program, nice it, slam it in the background, and forget about it.

Right, niceing seems to be one option another is to suspend it whilst people are directly logged in, Kevin and some others have tools for this kind of thing. Also there was a similar ultra-nice batch job suspender which came with RSA129, which we might pinch/combine. The problem with nicing is that most unix schedulers don't seem to know what nice means,.. you still get a noticable slow down on interactive jobs on SGI boxes even if you've got it npri -h 150, and even though the bruterc4 (and the bruteSSL too) have tiny resident core sizes). Also we thought there should be an hours of play option so you can tell it (the slave) when it is allowed to hammer the machine, say 6pm - 7am or whatever. So, yes the idea that you can slam it in the background and forget it is a very nice one as it ensures max resource usage. Also it would allow us to setup a semi-permanent key cracking ring, with slaves that can support cracking both SSL and RC4, plus whatever anyone else adds later, you would get to install a new "ability" then your machine would say know how to do relations for a RSA-512bit or whatever. Interesting to see how many MIPs can be mustered en masse for this kind of app. Adam