From: eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Thu Dec 16 1999 - 16:13:07 MST
Looking for a worthier case for burning CPU cycles than SETI@home?
Need look no further:
From: Xavier.Leroy@see.my.sig.for.address (Xavier Leroy)
Subject: ECDL crypto challenge to benefit Apache foundation
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 20:46:39 GMT
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Your idle CPU cycles are needed for the 7th ECDL challenge:
http://cristal.inria.fr/~harley/ecdl7/
This is arguably the largest public calculation ever to use a complex
parallel algorithm. Canadian company Certicom is offering a prize of
$10000 for the solution. If won, $8000 will be donated to the Apache
foundation and $1000 to each of the two participants who find parts of
the solution.
ECDL stands for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm, and is the
mathematical problem at the heart of the ECC public key cryptosystem
put forward by Certicom (http://www.certicom.com) as a credible
alternative to RSA. To assay the strength of this cryptosystem,
Certicom has published a number of ECDL problems. The first six were
solved by Irish mathematician Robert Harley of INRIA (France). The
sixth one, solved last summer, took 40 days on a network of 750
machines. Robert Harley is now attacking the seventh challenge, which
is one order of magnitude harder. About 800 machines are already
working on it, and estimated completion time is over one year. If we
can get 10000 machines to work on this challenge, a couple of months
should suffice.
Source code and precompiled Linux binaries (RPMs and tarballs) are
available under the GPL, and include versions specially optimized for
64-bit processors and for MMX. The program uses lots of CPU time but
very little memory. It's the ideal candidate to run as background
task on your machine! Communication is done by e-mail or HTTP to a
central site. Note that this is not a trivially parallel exhaustive
search; some rather subtle mathematics are involved.
For more information on ECDL and on how to participate, see
the ECDL7 challenge pages, http://cristal.inria.fr/~harley/ecdl7/
Good luck!
- - Xavier Leroy
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Home page: http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/
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