(fwd) DES challenge organisation

[Mike Duvos]

Adam Back <aba at 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 at 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 at netcom.com     $    via Finger.                      $