:: 19-Jan-1999 19:27 (Tuesday) ::
It is with considerable excitement (and quite a bit of relief) that I can
now announce that the DES-III contest is officially ended.
At 07:15 am PST (14:15 UTC), just about the time when we all started
getting worried about the 24-hour waypoint, the solution to DES-III
arrived. The winning key, 92 2C 68 C4 7A EA DF F2, revealed the
plaintext message:
The unknown message is: See you in Rome (second AES conference,
March 22-23, 1999
The winning key was found by EFF’s Deep Crack hardware, and submitted to
the distributed.net servers immediately. RSA confirmation of the success
followed shortly thereafter.
It’s truly been a joy and a thrill to work with John Gilmore and the
other talented and clued people at EFF. Were it not for their
contributions to distributed.net, the 24-hour deadline would have been
a mouch more difficult goal to reach.
I’ll be running stats for the partial 19-Jan work up to the point of
success and posting them this afternoon for the archives.
More details will follow soon as the dust settles, RSA is planning a
12:00 noon PST announcement at the RSA ’99 Convention. Both John Gilmore
and our own Peter Gildea will be in attendance.
Here’s a few statistics on our aggregate success:
Start of contest: January 18, 1999 at 09:00 PST
End of contest: January 19, 1999 at 07:15 PST
Elapsed Time: 22 hours 15 minutes
Percentage Complete: 22.2%
Size of keyspace: 72,057,594,037,927,936
Keys Tested: 16,017,142,616,948,736
Blocks Tested: 29,834,253
Overall Keyrate: 199 Gkeys/sec
Peak Keyrate: 250 Gkeys/sec