• What is it?
• The Nitty Gritty Details
• How do I join?
• It's asking me for a user name and password, where do I get those?
• I can't see my stats!
• What happens to my blocks if I join a team or change teams?
• What good are my 50 a day?
• What's a personal proxy? Do I need one?
• 1248 Days??? What's the point?
• Of all of distributed.net's projects, how do I dedicate my PC to RC5?
• Is it legal?
• How do I get the best performance for RC5?
• What about the prizes?

Distributed.net is a community effort to prove that idle time on a network of non-specialized computers can crack government sanctioned encryption standards.

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by Gomez

The DSLR / BBR RC5 Team is participating in a Secret Key Challenge that is sponsored by RSA Laboratories ( The inventors of RC5 encryption ). Distributed.net is one of the participants in this challenge and the DSLR / BBR RC5 Team participates in the challenge through Distributed.net as the BroadBandReports.com team.

Full Details on the Secret Key Challenge can be found here.

Distributed.net's website here.

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by PinHead edited by KeysCapt
last modified: 2006-03-08 02:38:33

For an updated, detailed description of how to join this team and get crunching, see this.

That's it!

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by Gomez edited by KeysCapt
last modified: 2003-12-14 18:17:48

Your user name is the Email address you use to submit keys.

You must request a password by going to the distrubuted.net stats page (»stats.distributed.net/projects.p···ect_id=8) and looking up your address in the 'Participant Stats' field.

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by Gomez edited by KeysCapt
last modified: 2003-12-14 17:58:05

Stats start running shortly after midnight UTC. Personal stats take 3-4 hours to run, then another 3-4 for the team stats. If you just joined, you may not see your stats the right away. If you submitted your first block before midnight UTC, you should be able to look them up the following day.

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by Gomez

If you are not on a team, your new team will get all your unallocated blocks. If you switch teams, your old blocks DO NOT TRANSFER.

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by Gomez

I see people on the team crunching 1000's per day ...

It's great that some people can crunch 1000's per day for their team, but the top teams are made of thousands of people making small contributions.

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by Gomez edited by KeysCapt
last modified: 2003-12-14 17:59:20

The only people who need a personal proxy, are those with multiple machines cracking keys. You can configure your clients to fetch from your proxy, rather than going to the main keyservers. You proxy will then manage the blocks to make sure your clients always have keys to crunch.

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by Gomez

.... You lost; if it takes that long to crack what's the point?

That's very common these days. First let's note that the project is running on non-specialized machines, using idle time. If you look at the DES-III contest (n0cgi.distributed.net/statistics/des3/..) you will notice that DeepCrack, a machine built by EFF on a limited budget, was the largest contributor. What resources does a funded effort have to launch a brute force attack?

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by Gomez edited by KeysCapt
last modified: 2003-12-14 18:00:45

From the Start menu, choose:
Programs -> distributed.net -> Quick Commands -> Client Configuration

Type 2 and press Enter (Buffer and Buffer Update Options)

Type 9 and press Enter (Load-work precedence)

In the New Setting--> field, Enter OGR=0,RC5-72

This will configure your client to ONLY check for RC5 keys (as opposed to OGR, DES, etc.). Once the RC5 contest is complete, you will need to reset this value in order to contribute to the next contest.

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by Gomez edited by KeysCapt
last modified: 2003-12-14 18:02:51

Yes!

This is NOT the same as cracking software for illegal use.

It is sponsored by the inventors of RC5 for the sole purpose of testing the strength of the algorithm.

Here is a snippet from the RSA Laboratories website:

The goal of the contests described here is to quantify the security offered by the government-endorsed data encryption standard (DES) and other secret-key ciphers with keys of various sizes. The information obtained from these contests is anticipated to be of value to researchers and developers alike as they estimate the strength of an algorithm or application against exhaustive key-search.

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by PinHead edited by Nick
last modified: 2004-06-18 16:28:40

If you're not sure if you're getting the best performance from your RC5 client, take a few minutes to benchmark all the cores to see which one gives you the best keyrate.

If you're in the "Core Throughput" view, go to View -> Console
Right click on the Console and go to Benchmark -> RC5-72 All Cores

This will start the benchmarking process for all the cores. Look at which of the cores will give you the highest keyrate.

Then, right click on the console again, go to "Configure"
Here choose "3" for Performance Related Options
Choose "1" for Core Selection
Set RC5=-1 to the core that performed the best.

Make sure you save your settings.

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by Nick
last modified: 2004-06-18 16:28:49

RSA will distribute the following prizes

* $1000 to the winner
* $1000 to the winner's team (or to the winner if not on a team)
* $6000 to a non-profit organization chosen by all participants
* $2000 to distributed.net for building the network and supplying the code

When I first started the team, I my intent was (and still is) to donate all the prize money that is won on behalf of the team to Justin for providing us with the community. This guarantees at least 1000$ for BroadBandReports.com. In addition, I hope that if the key is found by a member of our team, that additional 1000$ is also donated to Justin. The contribution of 6000$ would be determined by a poll amongst the team members.

As of May, 2007 RSA has chosen to discontinue their support and prices for RC-5. The prizes have also been pulled. If there are any additional announcements regarding this project, I will update as necessary.

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by Nick
last modified: 2007-07-10 12:08:28