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Projects

RC5-64:
distributed.net's longest-running project is the RC5-64 challenge. We're now cracking at 106.10 billion keys per second and are moving through the keyspace faster every day.

Optimal 24 Mark Golomb Rulers
Essentially, a Golomb Ruler is a mathematical term given to a set of whole numbers where no two pairs of numbers have the same difference. An Optimal Golomb Ruler (OGR) is just like an everyday ruler, except that the marks are placed so that no two pairs of marks measure the same distance. OGR's have many uses in the real world; for more information about them and the status of the project, please visit our pages devoted to our OGR effort. We're now testing at 0.00 billion nodes per second.

Past Projects

CS-Cipher Challenge:
The CS-Cipher Challenge was organized by CS Communications & Systems and was planned to last one year, through March 17, 2000. distributed.net found the key to decypher the unknown plaintext on January 16, 2000, after testing more than 98% of the keyspace in under 2 months! This challenge was meant to demonstrate how weak a 56-bit key is against brute force attacks.

DES-III
This project began on January 13th, 1999, at 9 AM PST. We successfully finished it after 22.5 hours with the help of EFF's Deep Crack custom DES cracker and achieved the $10K prize. For more information, feel free to peruse our DES-III headquarters.

DES II-2:
Just like it's predecessor, DES-II-2 was a timed contest. However, this time we were not able to find the key before the Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered the plaintext to be "It's time for those 128-, 192-, and 256-bit keys" through their use of custom hardware.

DES II-1:
The DES II-1 challenge was a time-dependant contest from RSA Labs which began on 13-Jan-1998 and was completed on 24-Feb-1998 with the key 76 9E 8C D9 F2 2F 5D EA and produced the plaintext message "The unknown message is: Many hands make light work."

RC5-56:
RC5-56 Ended October 22, 1997 when the announcement was made that the the key 0x532B744CC20999 presented us with the plaintext message "The unknown message is: It's time to move to a longer key length" was found.

Possible Projects

Distributed Chess Engine:
Remy de Ruysscher (remy@cyberservices.com) is in the process of organizing programmers to build a distributed chess engine module to be used with the eventual distributed.net V3 clients. Feel free to drop him a line if you're interested, and as the project gets a bit more organized, you'll be able to find more information here at distributed.net.

Mersenne Primes:
Large prime numbers. The current GIMPS effort seems to be doing quite well on it's own, a pleasant change from the early days when it was handled entirely via e-mail. There is also no "last" prime number, so this can serve as the default project in the future.

Fermat Numbers
Factor fermat numbers.

Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC)
Another cryptography challenge.