Break the barrier

Thomas Tavoly and the Amiga RC5 team are attempting something quite extraordinary. The RC5 encryption method relies on a huge string of numbers to act as an encryption key for secure data transfer over the Internet. Thomas and co are attempting to break that encryption. Don't worry, it's not illegal, but rather a challenge laid down by the people who created the encryption method. The main difference between the teams trying to break this encryption is that the Amiga RC5 effort is open to any Amiga owner with an Internet connection.

The system works by running a small program on your machine which sits in the background, chewing data at a priority of -20 which means that it only uses whatever spare cycles your processor has and won't affect the performance of your machine noticeably. It needs to be online when it wants new blocks of the keyfile, but will happily work on a randomly-generated block if you aren't online at the appropriate time.

At the moment, the Amiga team is lying in 149th place, but with enough machines having a go, Thomas is certain that the Amiga can be pushed to the front. Visit the Amiga RC5 homepage at http://www.cistron.nl/~ttavoly/rc5 for more details and the RC5 client you'll need.

Ben Vost           T: (+44) 01225 732337
Deputy Editor      F: (+44) 01225 732341
Amiga Format    e: bvost@futurenet.co.uk

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