The following message was posted by Bovine on the RC5 mailing list the other day. I’ll post it here for anyone that is not a mailing list subscriber:
Dear friends,
It is with great sadness that we must announce that RSA Labs has
decided to terminate the RSA Secret-Key Challenge, which impacts the
RC5-72 project and all of the remaining RC5 challenges. This means
that RSA Labs will not confirm any solutions or award any additional
prizes, should a correct solution be found. Furthermore, we have
received a statement indicating that they will not be disclosing the
solutions to the unsolved challenges. More details can be found on
http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2100 (Note that the page should
state that the RC5-32/12/8 solution was recovered on 14 July 2002, not
28 January 1997.)Although RSA Labs is halting their official sponsorship, there is
still the option open to us to continue the project without their
prize or validation. We would like to solicit your feedback regarding
this option. Discussion is welcome on our rc5 mailing list (see
http://lists.distributed.net/mailman/listinfo/rc5 if you are not
already a member). In the coming days, we will provide a facility to
allow official votes to be made.If the choice to discontinue the RC5-72 project is made, the official
transition plan will be as follows: In one week’s time from the
announced decision, the distributed.net keyservers will begin
indicating that the RC5-72 project is closed to all connecting dnetc
clients. All results received after that time will be discarded. A
couple of days before then, we will begin slowing down RC5 work unit
generation to allow the network to drain. If we receive sufficient
feedback indicating that you would like us to continue operating the
RC5-72 project, we will continue to generate work units and the
project will remain open.We intend to continue operating the OGRp2 project, and are currently
in the development stages of additional types of projects. More
details regarding these future projects will be announced at a later
date. In the mean time, we encourage everyone to continue
participating in both the RC5-72 and OGRp2 projects.Moo! ]:8)
Currently, the RC5 mailing list members are discussing the future of RC5 (OGR will continue as before). Some members want to cancel the contest and move on to some other contest, others want to continue RC5 without the prize money. Confirming the “winning” key might be problematic, since we won’t have a neutral referee (RSA Labs) and the complete plain text of the encrypted phrase is unknown.
Continuing would mean many more years of work, especially if there is a substantial drop of in participation. Note that the RC5 contest is currently at less than 1/2 % complete and it has been running for several years.
If you have an opinion on this matter, you might want to subscribe to the mailing list (go to the dnet web site and follow the links) and voice it quickly.
It may be a while before new contest cores can be written for the DNET client, if the decision is made to cancel RC5 support and replace it with a different contest.
I anticipate that most of the other teams will switch to OGR, at least in the short term. This will put a lot of pressure on us, if we want to stay as highly ranked as we are. I’m doing my part, but we will need some more CPU cycles to stay on top in the long term. Think about upgrading your older machines and adding friends, family and neighbors machines to the effort. Try overclocking your older machines – it just might help!
I’d like to hear your views on the RC5 contest cancellation here too.
Kevin
Well,
after Kevin helped me to get my few computers organised, I was only with one slower notebook crunshing RC5 packets. I now have switched this last one to OGR too.
If the final plain text message is not known, what are we calculating for? RC5 was interesting from a contest point of view, a competition.
But now the finish line was wiped out…does it make sense now to calculate a key “brute force” when there are more intelligent ways to find the key today, when the key will remain unknown and when there is no competition left?
I did not vote on the RC5/dnet lists, however, after checking the posts there it seems that RC5 will die – sooner or later.
As dnet did not yet announce the issue “fully public”, the RC5 rates are quite stable, still…
There are only few teams in OGR which could cause us problems. At least there might be 2 or 3 who could get closer to the Team Warped within the next 2 or 3 years…but if we all would stop RC5 crunshing, it would take them much longer.
Thats it from my side.
Best regards from Europe
Jürgen
I agree with Jurgen, that we should all push hard on OGR and leave RC5 behind. I think that the RC5 contest will be pulled completely, long before the key could possibly be found.
As much as some of us might want to continue RC5, it would be decades before we see the completion, even with hardware improvements.
The OGR completion goal is reachable in the next couple years, and Team Warped is well ahead of the rest of the pack. If our remaining team members shift from RC5 to OGR, we can maintain our high standing all the way through the end of the OGR challenge.
Don’t get me wrong – I will continue to support Team Warped members that wish to work mostly on RC5, and the new Cowboy server I am designing retains all the familiar RC5 stats. I don’t want to chase off any of our members that want to continue working on that challenge.
Please note that the end of the RC5-72 contest is nearer than you think, and the outcome will likely NOT be the location of the key. I suspect the RC5-72 contest will end with a whimper, and not a bang.
I hope to have the new Cowboy server up and running by 4th quarter, 2007. The new server addresses some reliability and system loading issues.
A little known statistic – Cowboy has processed nearly 68,000 log emails in the last 90 days!
Keep them coming guys!
Kevin