on Fri, Oct 26, 2001 at 12:32:28PM +0100, Jenny_Hopkins@toby-churchill.com wrote:
Ricardo Campos wrote:
On a lighter note, (TFIF!), Team ALUG's doing pretty well (I think, considering we're up against SPARC machines at universities etc.) on www.distributed.net: "Anglian Linux User Group (ALUG) completed 3,239 blocks yesterday at a sustained rate of 10,063 Kkeys/second! Anglian Linux User Group (ALUG) is ranked #1,351 for yesterday!" http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/tmsummary.php3?team=14531
Their website leaves fluffy pink clouds floating around in my head where I thought I had a brain....um, what are you trying to find?
RSA have a series of challenges. The task is to crack an encrypted peice of text as quickly as possible. The encrypted peice of text is encrypted with some key. If you can find the key, you can decrypt the encrypted text, and win a prize.
So, distributed.net are trying to crack (decrypt) the text by trying every key possible. This is a huge task for a single person to do. The key is 64bit in this case. Every bit has two states, on or off, so there are 2^64 possible keys, or 18446744073709551616 keys.
distributed.net assigns each client a series of keys to try, the client then tries those keys. If it happens to be assigned the key that decrypts the text correctly, it is the winner. Otherwise it tells distributed.net that none worked, and moves on to the next batch from distributed.net.
Alas the clients aren't open source.