DES 2 challenge: Are you going to help?

[Douglas F. Elznic]

On Sat, 10 Jan 1998, Trei Family wrote:
> I've heard of only one organized group which plans to attack it; the one
> based at www.distributed.net This is the same group which successfully 
> brute forced 56 bit RC5 encryption. My educated guess, based on the speed 
> with which they are currently searching RC5-64 (about 11 Gkey/sec) and the 
> known speed differences between RC5 and DES searching, is that they have 
> a good but not certain chance of finding the key within the $10,000 window.
> [Interesting factoid - at that speed they could crack 40 bit RC5 keys at
> better than one a minute.]
But distributed.net will not be focusing all of thier computing power on
one project. They are also doing the old des contests. So the power will
be diminished a little bit.

--
Douglas F. Elznic
delznic at acm.org
"If they give you lined paper, write the other way."
Freedom through Electronic Resistance