IP: DES Cracked in 22 hrs, 30 mins

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 14:08:10 -0600
To: farber () cis upenn edu
From: Scott Schram <scott () ruthie com>

A partnership between Distributed.net and the Electronic Frontier
Foundation has successfully decoded a DES message encrypted as a challenge
by RSA, demonstrating that DES is not secure.

http://www.distributed.net

http://www.rsa.com

"You don't have to work all day long to break DES  Press announcement soon!"

http://www.eff.org

"EFF's DES Cracker makes headlines again! Working with Distributed.Net, our
machine was the winner of RSA's DES-III Challenge (DES Cracker accounted
for 80mil. of the total Distributed.Net 220mil. keys per second) - press
release forthcoming (Jan. 19, 1999)"

and

> From http://www.distributed.net (Since it's difficult to get on there 
right now:)
---------------------------------------------------
It is with considerable excitement (and quite a bit of relief) that I can 
now announce that the DES-III contest is officially ended.
At 07:15 am PST (14:15 UTC), just about the time when we all started 
getting worried about the 24-hour waypoint, the solution to DES-III 
arrived. The winning key, 92 2C 68 C4 7A EA DF F2, revealed the 
plaintext message:
The unknown message is: See you in Rome (second AES conference, 
March 22-23, 1999
The winning key was found by EFF's Deep Crack hardware, and submitted to 
the distributed.net servers immediately. RSA confirmation of the success 
followed shortly thereafter.
It's truly been a joy and a thrill to work with John Gilmore and the 
other talented and clued people at EFF. Were it not for their 
contributions to distributed.net, the 24-hour deadline would have been 
a much more difficult goal to reach.
I'll be running stats for the partial 19-Jan work up to the point of 
success and posting them this afternoon for the archives.
More details will follow soon as the dust settles, RSA is planning a 
12:00 noon PST announcement at the RSA '99 Convention. Both John Gilmore 
and our own Peter Gildea will be in attendance.
Here's a few statistics on our aggregate success:
Start of contest: January 18, 1999 at 09:00 PST 
End of contest: January 19, 1999 at 07:15 PST 
Elapsed Time: 22 hours 15 minutes 
Percentage Complete: 22.2% 
Size of keyspace: 72,057,594,037,927,936 
Keys Tested: 16,017,142,616,948,736 
Blocks Tested: 29,834,253 
Overall Keyrate: 199 Gkeys/sec 
Peak Keyrate: 250 Gkeys/sec

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________________________________________________________________________ 
|David McNett |To ensure privacy and data integrity this message| 
|nugget () distributed net|has been encrypted by using dual rounds of ROT-13| 
|Birmingham, AL USA |finger nugget () distributed net for my news and pgp|