Does the EFF DES Cracker really work?
The EFF DES Cracker first solved a challenge posed more than a year ago by world-renowned cryptographer and AT&T Labs research scientist, Matt Blaze. The “Blaze Challenge” was designed to only be solvable by “brute force” cryptanalysis of DES. Mr. Blaze challenged the world to find matching pairs of plaintext and ciphertext numbers, consisting of nothing but repeated digits. Blaze himself was unaware of any such pairs until the EFF DES Cracker revealed the first known pair. It found that a hexadecimal key of 0E 32 92 32 EA 6D 0D 73 turns a plaintext of 8787878787878787 into the ciphertext 0000000000000000. The DES Cracker’s second problem was to win the DES-cracking speed competition posed by RSA Laboratories ( http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/ ). Two previous RSA challenges proved that massive collections of computers coordinated over the Internet could successfully crack DES. The DES Cracker faced tough competition from the massively parallel software effort of www.distributed.net. This co
