Re: [DES] Anguilla surpasses US military in code breaking challe

> From:          Vincent Cate <vince@offshore.com.ai>
> To:            cypherpunks@toad.com
> Subject:       Anguilla surpasses US military in code breaking challenge.

Vince writes:

> Press Release
> Anguilla, June 16, 1997
> 
>     Anguilla surpasses US military in code breaking challenge.
> 
> The Caribbean country of Anguilla has searched through more than
> 2,380,000,000,000 code keys as part of the Deschall effort to break a DES
> encrypted message.  This is in response to a challenge by RSA Inc to show
> that DES 56 bit keys are not large enough given the rapid advances in
> computing technology.  As of June 16th, the entire US military effort,
> represented by Internet machine names ending in ".mil" in the Deschall
> statistics pages, has searched fewer keys.  Anguilla host names end in
> ".com.ai".  Anguilla is a free and democratic country, that does not limit
> key lengths. 


NOT a press release, but true.

  Framingham,MA , June 16, 1997
  
      Process Software surpasses Anguilla in code breaking challenge.
  
  The small software firm of Process Software has searched through more 
  than 25,600,000,000,000 code keys as part of an independent effort to 
  break a DES encrypted message.  This is in response to a challenge by RSA
  Inc to show that DES 56 bit keys are not large enough given the
  rapid advances in computing technology.  As of June 16th, the entire
  US military effort, represented by Internet machine names ending in
  ".mil" in the Deschall statistics pages, has searched fewer keys. 
  Anguilla host names end in ".com.ai".  

This represents 5965 2^32 key segments, or 0.035% of the total 
keyspace. We've got a long way to go.

It's worth noting that the DESChall people claim to have now
searched over 23% of the keyspace, and at the current rate will 
have searched the whole thing about 3 months from now.

They have not released their source code for independent 
evaluation. I for one would feel a lot more comfortable with
DESChall if there was at least some outside review, even if
no general release is made.

Peter Trei
trei@process.com

Peter Trei wrote:
> Vince writes:
> > Press Release
> >     Anguilla surpasses US military in code breaking challenge.

> > The Caribbean country of Anguilla has searched through more than
> > 2,380,000,000,000 code keys as part of the Deschall effort to break a DES
> > encrypted message.

> They have not released their source code for independent
> evaluation. I for one would feel a lot more comfortable with
> DESChall if there was at least some outside review, even if
> no general release is made.

Peter,
  I emailed the DESChall folks about the same time I was accusing
them and you and the Swedish (?) guy of conspiring to save the
good keys to yourself and demanded their source code, which they
sent to me.
  I read code with the same expertise that Richard Nixon does
standup comedy, but I have a girlfriend who dreams in algorithms
and she was mightily impressed with the code itself. Unfortunately,
they had a problem with hackers fucking with their code and doing
interceptions on the data being transmitted back to their site.

  Since the DESChall folks were so kind as to share their source
code (they have modified it, since then) with a self-professed
lunatic, I have no doubt that they would not object to a real
player in the crypto game (such as yourself) taking a gander at
their source code. They may even need some kindhearted soul to
help them transport it to a specific platform.
  If you contact them and they tell you to fuck off, then give
me a holler and I'll see if Bianca still has the source from
their previous version of the DESChall software. (I think that
the changes in procedure they made applied only to the handling
of the server/client communications so that Dimitri couldn't add
ASCII art to the keycheck results.)

Toto
http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/carljohn/

> They have not released their source code for independent 
> evaluation. I for one would feel a lot more comfortable with
> DESChall if there was at least some outside review, even if
> no general release is made.

I do not keep up with the various DES challenge efforts: Did DESChall 
ever give a reason for not releasing source code?
Has anyone tried reverse engineering the executable? 

Does anyone have statistics on how quick deschall is as opposed to, for 
example, Bryddes? If they haven`t released source code and it is 
significantly faster it may be they have further key schedule 
optimisations they do not wish to share.

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"

The DESCHALL source is available under NDA. The timings of the various 
DESCHALL clients are on their homepage at 
http://www.frii.com/~rcv/deschall.htm


-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred

On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, Paul Bradley wrote:

> 
> > They have not released their source code for independent 
> > evaluation. I for one would feel a lot more comfortable with
> > DESChall if there was at least some outside review, even if
> > no general release is made.
> 
> I do not keep up with the various DES challenge efforts: Did DESChall 
> ever give a reason for not releasing source code?
> Has anyone tried reverse engineering the executable? 
> 
> Does anyone have statistics on how quick deschall is as opposed to, for 
> example, Bryddes? If they haven`t released source code and it is 
> significantly faster it may be they have further key schedule 
> optimisations they do not wish to share.