The fastest computer on earth has a cpu on my desk
The fastest computer on earth has a cpu on my desk
Well, the fastest computer on earth is actually the virtual computer of distributed.net. More than 10.000 people combine their idle process power for one computational task: the Bovine RC5 Decryption Effort
Quoted from the Bovine RC5 FAQIn order to try to beat the RSA Secret-Key Challenge, many people on the net have been using their computer's idle processing time to help crack the code. This will require testing at most 2^64 (18 446 744 073 709 551 616) keys to determine the correct one. We are working on the contest on the RSA Contest Page with the identifier RC5-32/12/8 (the fifth from the top).
The Bovine RC5 Effort was formed to take the responsibilities of coordinating and maintaining the RC5 servers that are needed to distribute key blocks to work on to all of the participating client programs. To combat the network traffic and reliability problems, our effort depends heavily on multiple proxy servers so that network load can be distributed much more evenly. The proxy servers are in constant communication with each other to prevent duplicated work from being done.
After the finishing our rc5-56 we have moved on to rc5-64. We are also looking at other contests and projects, but are not ready to take them on at this time.
To make things more interesting, some people have decided to work together in groups (rather than individually) and thus increase interest and participation. It is important to note that this is not about one team versus another, or about who actually cracks the key. This is an effort to demonstrate to the U.S. government that 64-bit encryption is not sufficient as an international encryption mechanism. If a collection of amateur Internet enthusiasts can break the encryption (and we will), then limitless government or corporate budgets can certainly do the same in less time.
Why are you doing this?
There are probably as many reasons as there are participants, however there are a few common themes that stand out:
To do something with all this computing power
After finishing the rc5-56 key, we needed a project that could use our existing clients codebase very easily. Instead of a mad rush to push the unready V3 clients out the door, we decided to make the small alterations necessary to do 64 bit. This insured little loss of the large amount of volunteer computing power.To prove that 64-bit encryption is insufficient
If a loosely-organized group of people on the net can hack 56 bit in their spare time, and immediately move onto 64 bit, it's certainly reason to rethink our current encryption export policies and standards.To explore the feasibility of cooperative networked multiprocessing
It's fascinating to see how easy (and difficult) it has been to band together many this computers, with this many operating systems, in this many time zones and work towards a common computing task.Because it's fun
Perhaps in the same way that writing a tic-tac-toe program in sendmail.cf is fun to some people, it's been a rewarding diversion for everyone involved.To get to know more people
You'd be amazed by the amount of people you can meet by running this client, especially if you hang out in the EfNet #RC5 chanell, or subscribe to the lists.To attract the opposite sex
Well, maybe it has, maybe it hasn't.. You never know ;).
My statistics in the distributed.net group
| Creation | fquestie@vub.vub.ac.be | 14-Dec-97 |
|---|---|---|
| Last Update | fquestie@vub.vub.ac.be | 14-Dec-97 |
| hits on this page since | 14-Dec-97 | |
| hits on all pages since | 24-Oct-95 |