DESCHALL Project
DESCHALL, short for DES Challenge, was the first group to publicly break a message which used the Data Encryption Standard (DES), becoming the $10,000 winner of the first of the set of DES Challenges proposed by RSA Security in 1997. It was established by a group of computer scientists led by Rocke Verser[1] assisted by Justin Dolske and Matt Curtin and involved thousands of volunteers who ran software in the background on their own machines, connected by the Internet. They announced their success on June 18, only 96 days after the challenge was announced on January 28.
Background
To search the 72
There were two other main contenders: SoINET[3] (a Swedish group), and a group at Silicon Graphics, a manufacturer of high-performance computers, which was in the lead until late in the day. Other groups using supercomputers withdrew after SYN flood attacks on their networks.[citation needed]
The Project
With the software that was used, a single 200 MHz Pentium system was able to test approximately 1 million keys/second if it was doing nothing else. At this rate it would take around 2,285 years to search the entire key-space. The number of computers being used rose rapidly and in the end, a total of 78,000 different IP addresses had been recorded, with a maximum of 14,000 unique hosts in a 24-hour period. By the time the key was found, they had searched about a quarter of the key-space and were searching about 7 billion keys per second, but the number of participants was still increasing rapidly.
The solution was:
Strong cryptography makes the world a safer place.
The owner of the computer that found the solution was awarded $4,000 of the prize, with the rest going to the originator of the project.
The conclusion of the paper describing the project was "We have demonstrated that a brute-force search of DES keyspace is not only possible, but is also becoming practical for even modestly funded groups. RSA's prize for the find was US$10,000; it is safe to say that DES is inadequate for protecting data of any greater value."[4]
See also
- Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard
- distributed.net
- RSA Factoring Challenge
- RSA Secret-Key Challenge
Footnotes
- ^ "Rocke Verser's home page". Archived from the original on 2007-12-01. Retrieved 2008-07-17.
- ^ Verser's algorithm
- ^ "SoINET home page". Archived from the original on 2008-10-01. Retrieved 2008-07-17.
- ^ "A Brute Force Search of DES Keyspace". Archived from the original on 2016-10-19. Retrieved 2008-07-17.
References
- Matt Curtin (2005). Brute Force. Springer-Verlag, New York.