The DES Challenges were a series of brute force attack contests created by RSA Security to highlight the lack of security provided by the Data Encryption Standard .
9-718: The first challenge began in 1997 and was solved in 96 days by the DESCHALL Project . DES Challenge II-1 was solved by distributed.net in 39 days in early 1998. The plaintext message being solved for was "The secret message is: Many hands make light work." DES Challenge II-2 was solved in just 56 hours in July 1998, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), with their purpose-built Deep Crack machine. EFF won $ 10,000 for their success, although their machine cost $ 250,000 to build. The contest demonstrated how quickly
18-415: A 486-based PS/2 PC with 56MB of memory and announced the project via Usenet towards the end of March. Client software was rapidly written for a large variety of home machines and eventually some more powerful 64 bit systems. There were two other main contenders: SoINET (a Swedish group), and a group at Silicon Graphics , a manufacturer of high-performance computers , which was in the lead until late in
27-400: A maximum of 14,000 unique hosts in a 24-hour period. By the time the key was found, they had searched about a quarter of the key-space and were searching about 7 billion keys per second, but the number of participants was still increasing rapidly. The solution was: Strong cryptography makes the world a safer place. The owner of the computer that found the solution was awarded $ 4,000 of
36-553: A rich corporation or government agency, having built a similar machine, could decrypt ciphertext encrypted with DES. The text was revealed to be "The secret message is: It's time for those 128-, 192-, and 256-bit keys." DES Challenge III was a joint effort between distributed.net and Deep Crack. The key was found in just 22 hours 15 minutes in January 1999, and the plaintext was "See you in Rome (second AES Conference, March 22-23, 1999)". After
45-617: The Data Encryption Standard (DES), becoming the $ 10,000 winner of the first of the set of DES Challenges proposed by RSA Security in 1997. It was established by a group of computer scientists led by Rocke Verser assisted by Justin Dolske and Matt Curtin and involved thousands of volunteers who ran software in the background on their own machines, connected by the Internet . They announced their success on June 18, only 96 days after
54-485: The DES had been shown to be breakable, FBI director Louis Freeh told Congress, "That is not going to make a difference in a kidnapping case. It is not going to make a difference in a national security case. We don't have the technology or the brute force capability to get to this information." It was not until special purpose hardware brought the time down below 24 hours that both industry and federal authorities had to admit that
63-530: The DES was no longer viable. Although the National Institute of Standards and Technology started work on what became the Advanced Encryption Standard in 1997, they continued to endorse the DES as late as October 1999, with FIPS 46-3. However, Triple DES was preferred. DESCHALL Project DESCHALL , short for DES Challenge, was the first group to publicly break a message which used
72-405: The challenge was announced on January 28. To search the 72 quadrillion possible keys of a 56-bit DES key using conventional computers was considered impractical even in the 1990s. Rocke Verser already had an efficient algorithm that ran on a standard PC and had the idea of involving the spare time on hundreds of other such machines that were connected to the internet. So they set up a server on
81-463: The day. Other groups using supercomputers withdrew after SYN flood attacks on their networks. With the software that was used, a single 200 MHz Pentium system was able to test approximately 1 million keys/second if it was doing nothing else. At this rate it would take around 2,285 years to search the entire key-space. The number of computers being used rose rapidly and in the end, a total of 78,000 different IP addresses had been recorded, with
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