The Acorn User Group RC5/DES Cracking Effort

Welcome to the Acorn User Group's RC5/DES cracking page. You can either read this entire page through, or click on one of the following underlined icons to move to that section. Just have to say a quick thanks to Kevin Osborne, Heiko Schueler and Cybin for their graphics used in the animated GIF. The Acorn User Group 'Team ID' is 4266.

What is the RC5/DES project?

This is a project incorporating thousands of computers around the globe, managed by distributed.net. Basicially, it is about legally decrypting messages. The RC5-64 contest is a long-term contest, and may take a couple of years to solve, while the DES contests, run twice a year, are short, and should take less than a month to solve. These tasks are achieved by using your computer's idle time to check whether a particular key is the correct one. As thousands of computers are involved, huge tasks can be accomplished, as has been proven in distributed.net's cracking of a 56 bit RC5 key.

Why would I want to join?

The first reason is that you can win $1000 is you happen to find the correct key! The only slight problem is that the chances of this is around 18,446,743,900,000,000,000 to 1 per every key block tried.

The second reason is fame. The more blocks you try, the higher up in the ranks you go. Also, if you have elected to join a team (similar to a lottery syndicate), your team's rank will get higher and higher. If one of the members of your team finds the correct key, a further $1000 is distributed between all the members.

How do I become part of it?

You will need to download a client for your particular platform in order to become connected to distributed.net. Visit http://www.distributed.net/ and click on 'Moo: Download the client' to reach a listing of all different clients. From here you can download the client for any platform available; make sure you get the GUI version!

Once you download the client, unarchive it and run it. This should bring up a new icon at the right side of the icon bar. You must set it up before usage, with your e-mail address and buffer sizes, logging, performance and startup options.

How do I setup the client?

When you first load !RC5DES, it should bring up a configuration window. First of all, enter your e-mail address in the 'User' section. Leaving the 'Networking' and 'Connection' settings as they are should be sufficient for now.

In the 'Buffers' section, you can choose how large you want your key blocks to be. Choosing a value of '28' will fetch the smallest blocks. This means that they will be decoded the quickest, but it only counts as one block on your statistics. On the other hand, choosing a value of '31' will fetch the largest blocks. This means they will take longer to decode (8 times longer over a 2^28 block), but it counts as 8 blocks on your statistics.

Leaving all other options as they are is enough to get you started. Once you get used to the client, it is advisable to change some of the other options.

What's the Acorn User Group?

In the RC5-64 contests, you are allowed to join what is known as a 'team'. Although you don't have to join a team, they exist to show group strength, to advocate a platform etc. The only disadvantage to joining a team is that a part of the prize money that would normally go to you will be split with your team.

In the case of the Acorn User Group, it's main objective is to advocate the Acorn platform, and to get others to notice the Acorn platform. The main contact for this team is Ian Molton.

Briefly, how is the client used?

Once you have configured the client and it is running, a white window should open with the current status of the client. After the words 'x RC5 blocks are in file buff-out/rc5', it may seem as though nothing is happening. What is actually happening is your first block decrypting. After a while, you will see a '.' appear on the screen. If you leave it a while longer, '10%' will appear. Once this gets to '100%', a block is completed.

If you wish to send this completed block to the distributed.net server, press menu over the window, go over to 'Network' and click on 'Perform network flush'.

How do I join the team?

Before distributed.net can recognise you, you have to have submitted at least one block to a 'keyserver'. After an average of 24 hours since you submitted your first block, you should receive an e-mail from distributed.net telling you information on altering your user account.

To join a team, go to http://stats.distributed.net/ and search for your 'personal page'. To do this, scroll down to the entry 'search for e-mail address' and enter your e-mail address, then click 'go'. You should be given a screen that shows your current rank, e-mail address, total blocks, time working, date of last block and average keyrate. Click on your e-mail address and you will be taken to your personal page.

If you haven't already received your password, scroll to the bottom where it says 'Mail me a password' and click. Then, wait for your password to arrive. if it hasn't arrived in your e-mail in 15 minutes or so, go back to your personal page and click 'Whoops! I can't seem to find my password. Can you send it to me again?'

Once your password arrives, enter your password on your personal page and click 'Edit participant information'. once inside, you'll see a screen with your e-mail address, team affiliation, charity selectionand a button that says 'update participant information'. Here, enter the team id of the team you wish to join. In the case of the Acorn User Group, it is 4266. You may also wish to vote on where the charity part of the prize money will go at this time as well. When you're done, click 'update participant information'

Congratulations, you've just joined a team!


[Alpha Programming]
http://www.alphapro.demon.co.uk/
16th August 1998