Note: The following information is pulled directly from the distributed.net web site.
The
"Bovine" RC5 effort was formed to take the responsibilities of
coordinating and maintaining the RC5 servers that are needed to distribute key
blocks to work on to all of the participating client programs. We depend heavily
- entirely - on the participation of people like yourself, as we intend to solve
this project via the use of brute force, trying every possible key there is.
We know this method works. On 19 October 1997 at 1325 UTC, we found the correct solution for the previous project - RSA Labs' 56-bit secret-key challenge. (That's RC5-32/12/7 56-bit for you stats junkies.) The key was 0x532B744CC20999, and it took us 250 days to locate.
Our current overall RC5 network rate is 105.11 gigakeys per second. You can find out more information about our network speed at our RC5-64 statistics page.
If you have any technical support questions regarding the operations of your distributed.net client, then please click here to send mail to help@distributed.net. Be sure to also check out the FAQ-o-Matic to see if your question has already been answered.
RSA Labs is offering a US$10,000 prize to the group that wins this contest. The distribution of the cash will be as follows:
The vote will be decided on through an extension of the statistics engine, with one vote per block per person.