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Press Release
PR - Team DES Australia - Distributed Computing Team
Friday, 10 July 1998 - Help us show Australia's computing power!
Distributed computing is here, and anyone with a computer can join in. Distributed computing is running a program on thousands of computers at the same time to solve previously impossible problems - by breaking the problem down into many small, manageable chunks.
Currently two distributed computing projects are being co-ordinated by the volunteer organisation distributed.net, both cracking encypted messages. The first is to crack an RC5-64 bit message, the second to crack the US Government's standard DES encryption (again!)
So where do Team DES Australia fit into all this? Since distributed computing projects began over a year ago, many teams have sprung up with differing agendas. First was The Australian Dudes, who are combining forces with Team Australia to form a unified team to show the power of Australian computing to the world. The Team is always looking for and welcoming new members, for information visit our web page at http://des.whatever.net.au/.
We are doing this to show that the current limitations on Australian use of encryption by the US Government are inadequate. If they can be broken by hobbyists working in their spare time within a short time frame, our case rests. The imminent DES-II-2 challenge is expected to fall within ten days!
DES-II-2 is one of the contests in RSA's Secret-Key Challenge http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/html/challenges.html. In order to try to beat the RSA Secret-Key Challenge, many people on the net have been using their computer's idle processing time to help crack the code. This will require testing at most 2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,600,000 keys to determine the correct key for the long term RC5-64 project. If keys were grains of rice, Australia would be covered 15cm deep!
For further information about The Australian Dudes or for links to other RC5 sites visit our page on the web:
If you have questions about The Australian Dudes don't hesitate to e-mail us at: rc5-dudes@epage.com.au