CU Amiga Online 16-Sep-97 - Amiga RC5 effort

By Neil Bothwick

The RSA Secret Key Challenge is an competition from the American RSA cryptography company to prove that the current encryption schemes are insufficient for the Net. The US government endorsed DES encryption standard was cracked early on by the 1997 Secret Key Challenge. This involves RSA offering prize money for cracking the key. From here, collaborating efforts arise on the Net which coordinate the CPU horsepower from many computers towards to brute force cracking effort.

While DES has been cracked, the RC5 algorithm is next under attack for a total prize money of $10,000. The leading effort to crack this RC5 key challenge is the Bovine group. Bovine is a multi-platform, multi-client effort which has the Amiga well represented.

There is an Amiga version of the cracking client but due to the astronomical quantity of CPU power required, the Amiga RC5 team is more of an exercise in Amiga users pooling resources, usually other computers with extremely powerful CPUs. Find out how the Amiga RC5 team is going so far.

CU Amiga Magazine has a variety of Power Macintoshes and 68060 based Amigas contributing well over 2 million checked keys a second. CU Amiga is just one company devoting CPU power to the Amiga RC5 effort, greater still is the huge number of Amiga individuals which has pushed the Amiga up to #6 in the daily statistics and 67 overall. The Amiga RC5 team was still climbing quickly as we went to press.

To contribute yourself, check out the Amiga RC5 team home page for details how.

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