* Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com) [990701 00:44]:
> Not really. Everyone pretty much knows how many CPU cycles cracking
> RC5 of a particular depth requires, and frankly, all this does is help 
> RSA DSI's marketing department. Sorry to be a party pooper, but RC5
> cracking is damn useless. It was one thing to show DES could be
> cracked, but showing large key RC5 requires half a year of heavy work
> from hundreds of thousands of machines isn't exactly a help.

Well, it IS usefull for some applications. I liked the examples on the
RC5-mailing list. Consider e.g. the recipe for Coca Cola. Even if it takes
you a year or two to decrypt it, that would matter. And there is
other data that should be kept protected for much longer than that.


> OTOH, doing science work with your spare cycles seems like a really
> good cause to me. It is unlikely anything will be found, but it sets
> an excellent precedent for future CPU cycle donations to science, and
> indeed to future (more likely to succeed) versions of the same project.

I guess there will be more options as soon as distributed.net comes around
to make other problems available. The next one will be the OGR (optimal
golomb ruler; a bit math that is in fact used for a few applications). And
after that? We'll see...

Bye, Bjoern

-- 
Bjoern Labitzke  <hermit@cs.tu-berlin.de>
   Use PGP! (Don't you use envelopes for your letters?)