I’m a participant in the RC5-72 attempt of Distributed.NET. For almost 4 years now. With about 72000 participants we came to a staggering 0.336% of the keyspace. Yup. That means with the current keyrate (speed of PC’s) we still have about 1100 years to go before we exausted the keyspace. If PCs become about 50 times faster than they are now (unlikely, but let’s assume they will), PC’s will still be crunching numbers for the next 21.8 years.
The point of the game/contest is to prove RC5 (we cracked the smaller ones) can be cracked with a brute force attack (just trying every key). I guess it’s safe to assume that RC5-72 or anything with an even higher number of key-bits can not be broken with brute force without some radical changes in hardware or software-algorithms.
So….I’m stopping my number crunchers: 2 laptops and 2 PC’s will have a cool CPU again. You can find the stats of my team here.
Moo!
Yup, it will be much cooler indeed. I gave up on the cows after purchasing a new pc with a variable speed cpu cooler. The noise was just a tad too intense. Well, son, you have worked more than your fair share the last four years, your country is proud of you. You should receive an iron cross, purple heart or something for this milestone! We salute you!
Should you suffer withdrawal symptoms anytime in the future, I bet you are aware there are plenty distributed computing projects available still to choose from. Alternatively you could look up Cruncher’s Anonymous in the local directory.