Introduction
What is this all about?
Its all about cracking keys, and doing it as fast as possible. Distributed.net started a challenge in 1997 to crack a 64 bit secret key, called the Bovine RC5-64 project. The task involves testing (at most) 2^64 (18,446,744,073,709,551,616) keys to find the one that properly decrypts the contest message. This is a monumental undertaking that will require an enormous amount of computing power to succeed. Bovine participants from all over the Internet provide that power in the form of spare CPU cycles on there own personal computers. Together they have helped to make the Bovine Project the largest and most powerful distributed computer on Earth!
Nowadays Distributed.net run several different projects, not just cracking contests.
How is this done in practice?
In practice the key cracking is done by splitting the whole problem into smaller parts called blocks. Each contestant installs a client on his or her own computer and downloads blocks from a keyserver. The client then cracks these blocks and returns the result to the keyserver. The clients are very nice programs that only uses spare CPU cycles, so you don't get any slowdown on the computer used. It does not require any noticeable bandwidth either, downloading and sending 10 blocks on a 28.8 modem takes less than 10 seconds. Each contestant can follow his or her progress on a statistics page on the main stat server on the Top 100 Overall list. If you're not on the top 100 you just search for you email to see what you position is.
Teams
Once a contestant has delivered his first block and the main stat-server has been updated he can join on of the over 8000 teams and give his blocks to that team. Listing of the top 100 teams for last day can be found on the Top 100 Yesterday list, and top teams overall on the Top 100 Overall list.
Team Quakenet has team nr. 8422 and the main statistics page can be found here.
Why would I want to join?
- Do something with all this computing power
It just going into the big black idle hole, so why not use it for something?
- Because you can win money!
RSA Labs is proffering a US$10,000 prize to the group that wins this contest. The distribution of the cash will be as follows:
- $1000 to the winner.
- $1000 to the winner's team.
- $6000 to a non-profit organization, decided by vote.
- $2000 to distributed.net for building the network and supplying the code.
- To help the quakenet team to become one of the largest teams in the world, and show the rest that there are lots of quakers around.
Team quakenet could easily become one of the mayor teams in the world. As an example, only 4 days after our first block was delivered we entered the Top 100 Yesterday list, and after about 3 mounths we entered the Top 100 Overall list.
- Because it's fun!
Believe it or not, it can actually be fun to compete in this as there always will be people with a similar keyrate as you on our stats pages for you to compete with.
To learn how to join our team read this page.