| Active Distributed Computing Projects - Cryptography |
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These links take you to other project categories on this site:
Mathematics Language Art Puzzles/Games Miscellaneous Distributed Human Projects Collaborative Knowledge Bases Charity See the bottom of this page for a description of the icons on the page. |
| Project Information | Project % Complete | Major Supported Platforms | |
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| Cryptography | |||
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Currently the RC5-72 and OGR-NG projects are active. Version 2.9103.509 of the client is available for most major platforms as of February 15, 2009. Pre-release version 2.9103.509 is available for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, AmigaOS and MorphOS as of Feruary 17, 2009. See a log of an IRC discussion forum with some of the project coordinators which took place on September 28, 2002. They discussed the results of the RC5-64 project and future directions for distributed.net. Use the RC5 key-rate calculator to see approximately what RC5 key-rate and OGR node-rate your CPU will produce. The calculator was created by CalicoJak in January, 2003, and was last updated on February 22, 2006. |
RC5-72: 0.669% in 2,513 days
OGR-27: |
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The M4
message breaking project is attempting to break 3 encrypted
signals (messages) which were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942
and which are believed to be unbroken. These signals were presented by
Ralph Erskine in a
letter to
the journal Cryptologia in December, 1995. The signals were presumably
enciphered with the four rotor
Enigma M4 cipher
machine. The project
broke one
of the signals on February 20, 2006, and hopes to break the other two within
one month with enough participation. The project expects to crack each
cipher with 1 to 10 walks through the Enigma keyspace. See the project's
latest results.
The project cracked its first message on February 20, 2006. It cracked its second message on March 7, 2006. On May 27, 2008, the project attempted to decode the Scharnhorst message and succeeded the next day. The project uses "a mixture of brute force and a hill climbing algorithm" to crack each cipher. The Enigma keyspace is too large for a brute force approach. The hill climbing algorithm tries to optimize the plugboard settings (which form a very large part of the keyspace) by changing the settings one step at a time and evaluating each step by determining how closely the deciphered plaintext matches the statistics of natural language. The scoring function uses Sinkov Statistics. The software client uses a Python script to download a workunit containing a range of 26^4 keys. It then uses a C program to test each key in the range, and then returns the best or most-fit result to the project server. See the M4 wiki for notes on running the client interactively, for running it on Mac OSX and Solaris, for running the client behind a firewall, and for many other useful tips. Note that there is no way to specify a user ID or to see your individual statistics. The client supports checkpointing, so it will restart at the point you stopped it the next time you run it. The latest version of the client is available for all supported platforms as of March 29. This version "avoids duplicate scrambler testing and has the ability to download new dictionaries. It also uses different naval dictionaries. Participants are encouraged to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible. Join a mailing list about this project. |
ongoing |
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Free Rainbow Tables
is generating Rainbow Tables to use for breaking hashes.
The project's software client is based on Zhu Shuanglei's
Project Rainbow Crack.
Results from the project are compiled into complete
tables, which are
then submitted to
freerainbowtables.com where
they are available for free to anyone.
To participate in the project, download the DistrRTgen software client from the project website and run it. Free registration is required (only a username and password, no other information is collected). Version 3.26 of the GUI client is available for Windows as of June 9, 2008. Note that you need to have Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 installed to run the Windows client. Join a discussion forum |
ongoing; 189,120 cracked hashes; 234,008 uncracked hashes |
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SHA-1 Collision Search Graz
is attempting to find collisions for the SHA-1
encryption algorithm, a popular algorithm which is used in many
software applications such as email and secure web browsing." SHA-1
is a hashing algorithm which produces a string of letters and numbers
(a "fingerprint") for a given text input. The project implements a
dedicated attack, which "tries to exploit the inner working of the hash
function" to find two different inputs which generate the same
fingerprint. See
about the project.
The project uses a BOINC-based client. See the BOINC platform information for the latest version of the BOINC client. The project runs the "SHA-1 Collision Search Graz" application within BOINC. Version 5.27 of the application is available for Windows and Linux as of August 8, 2007. Join a discussion forum about this project. |
301,144,737 credits |
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Enigma@Home is
a BOINC-based wrapper for the
M4 message breaking project.
The project uses a BOINC-based client. See the BOINC platform information for the latest version of the BOINC client. Version 5.17 of the project's Enigma 0.76 application is available for Windows as of September 11, 2007. Version 5.20 of the application is available for Linux as of September 25, 2007. Version 5.22 of the project's Enigma 0.76b application is available for Windows and Linux as of August 24, 2008. Join a discussion forum about this project. |
170,274,729 credits |
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 RSA Lattice Siever (2.0) is cracking encrypted 512-bit Operating System signing keys for Texas Instruments' programmable calculators. Discovering these keys allows owners of these calculators to have complete control over the calculators and to install new operating systems on them. This project was created after an individual cracked the OS key for the TI-83+, mentioned here and here. The project is sieving TI-68k keys (keyti89, keyti89t, keyti92p, keyv200), TI-Z80 keys ("01", "02", "03", "08", "0A", "0101" and "0102") and k0A keys in order to discover keys for Texas Instruments' other programmable calculators. 11 keys remain to be discovered as of August 16, 2009. The project uses a BOINC-based client. See the BOINC platform information for the latest version of the BOINC client. Version 1.07 of the project's GNFS Lattice Siever application is available for Windows and Linux as of August 13, 2009. Join a discussion forum about this project. |
unknown credits |
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Creating A5/1 Rainbow Tables is decrypting the A5/1 algorithm used in GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) to demonstrate the insecurity of the algorithm. Over 80% of the world's mobile phone market, used by 3 billion people in 200 countries, uses this encryption algorithm. If the project is successful, its results "will allow anyone with some RF equipment, patience, and a $500 laptop, the ability to decode GSM-based conversations and data transmissions." This project is a variation of one started by The Hackers Choice in early 2008. This project uses "more common hardware to generate the tables, namely graphics cards with GPGPU capability and attempt to build a distributed infrastructure of nodes where each node donates both a small portion of diskspace for a part of the table and some kind of fast hardware for the generation of and lookup in its own table." To participate in the project, follow the instruction on the project's main page to download and compile the client application's source code and to get unique table parameters to process. Subscribe to the project's mailing list. |
ongoing |
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