distributed.net

A coordinated effort was started in February 1997 by Earle Ady and Christopher G. Stach II of Hotjobs.com and New Media Labs, as an effort to break the RC5-56 portion of the RSA Secret-Key Challenge, a 56-bit encryption algorithm that had a $10,000 USD prize available to anyone who could find the key. Unfortunately, this initial effort had to be suspended as the result of SYN flood attacks by participants upon the server.[8]

A new independent effort, named distributed.net, was coordinated by Jeffrey A. Lawson, Adam L. Beberg, and David C. McNett along with several others who would serve on the board and operate infrastructure. By late March 1997 new proxies were released to resume RC5-56 and work began on enhanced clients. A cow head was selected as the icon of the application and the project's mascot.[9]

The RC5-56 challenge was solved on October 19, 1997 after 250 days. The correct key was "0x532B744CC20999" and the plaintext message read "The unknown message is: It's time to move to a longer key length".[10]

The RC5-64 challenge was solved on July 14, 2002 after 1,757 days. The correct key was "0x63DE7DC154F4D039" and the plaintext message read "The unknown message is: Some things are better left unread".[11]

The search for Optimal Golomb Rulers (OGRs) of order 24, 25, 26, 27 and 28 were completed by distributed.net on 13 October 2004, 25 October 2008, 24 February 2009, 19 February 2014, and 23 November 2022 respectively.[12][13][14][15][16]

"DNETC" is the file name of the software application which users run to participate in any active distributed.net project. It is a command line program with an interface to configure it, available for a wide variety of platforms.[17] distributed.net refers to the software application simply as the "client". As of April 2019, volunteers running 32-bit Windows with AMD FireStream enabled GPUs have contributed the most processing power to the RC5-72 project[18] and volunteers running 64-bit Linux have contributed the most processing power to the OGR-28 project.[19]

Portions of the source code for the client are publicly available, although users are not permitted to distribute modified versions themselves.[20]

Distributed.net's RC5-72 project is available on the BOINC client through the Moo! Wrapper.[21]

Average daily RC5-72 production by platform for 5 May 2023 – 26 May 2023[22]

In recent years, most of the work on the RC5-72 project has been submitted by clients that run on the GPU of modern graphics cards. Although the project had already been underway for almost 6 years when the first GPUs began submitting results, as of May 2023, GPUs represent 86% of all completed work units,[23] and complete more than 93% of all work units each day.[22]

• NVIDIA

In late 2007, work began on the implementation of new RC5-72 cores designed to run on NVIDIA CUDA-enabled hardware, with the first completed work units reported in November 2008. On high-end NVIDIA video cards at the time, upwards of 600 million keys/second was observed[24] For comparison, a 2008-era high-end single CPU working on RC5-72 achieved about 50 million keys/second, representing a very significant advancement for RC5-72. As of May 2023, CUDA clients have completed 11% of all work on the RC5-72 project.[23]

• AMD / ATI

Similarly, near the end of 2008, work began on the implementation of new RC5-72 cores designed to run on AMD FireStream-enabled hardware. Some of the products in the Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series provided key rates in excess of 1.8 billion keys/second.[25] As of May 2023, FireStream clients have completed nearly 28% of all work on the RC5-72 project.[23] Daily production from FireStream clients has dropped below 0.5% as the majority of AMD GPU contributors now use the OpenCL client.[23]

• OpenCL

An OpenCL client entered beta testing in late 2012 and was released in 2013. As of May 2023, OpenCL clients have completed more than 47% of all work on the RC5-72 project. No breakdown of OpenCL production by GPU manufacturer exists, as AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel GPUs all support OpenCL.[26]

Timeline of projects hosted by distributed.net, as of May 2023

Current

• RSA Lab's 72-bit RC5 Encryption Challenge — In progress, 10.413% complete as of 28 July 2023[27] (although RSA Labs has discontinued sponsorship)

Cryptography

• RSA Lab's 56-bit RC5 Encryption Challenge — Completed 19 October 1997 (after 250 days and 47% of the key space tested).
• RSA Lab's 56-bit DES-II-1 Encryption Challenge — Completed 23 February 1998 (after 39 days)[28]
• RSA Lab's 56-bit DES-II-2 Encryption Challenge — Ended 15 July 1998 (found independently by the EFF DES cracker after 2.5 days)[29]
• RSA Lab's 56-bit DES-III Encryption Challenge — Completed 19 January 1999 (after 22.5 hours with the help of the EFF DES cracker)
• CS-Cipher Challenge — Completed 16 January 2000 (after 60 days and 98% of the key space tested).[30]
• RSA Lab's 64-bit RC5 Encryption Challenge — Completed 14 July 2002 (after 1726 days and 83% of the key space tested).[31]

Golomb rulers

• Optimal Golomb Rulers (OGR-24) — Completed 13 October 2004[32] (after 1552 days, confirmed predicted best ruler)
• Optimal Golomb Rulers (OGR-25) — Completed 24 October 2008[33] (after 3006 days, confirmed predicted best ruler)
• Optimal Golomb Rulers (OGR-26) — Completed 24 February 2009[34] (after 121 days, confirmed predicted best ruler)
• Optimal Golomb Rulers (OGR-27) — Completed 19 February 2014[35] (after 1822 days, confirmed predicted best ruler)
• Optimal Golomb Rulers (OGR-28) — Completed 23 November 2022[36] (after 3199 days, confirmed predicted best ruler)

• RSA Secret-Key Challenge
• Golomb Ruler
• DES Challenges
• Brute force attack
• Cryptanalysis
• Key size
• List of volunteer computing projects
• Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

• Official website