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06.11.08 Use Your Resources For The Greater Good  By
Dan MorrillIf you feel like taking on a real challenge, and have some spare CPU cycles to donate then this might just be the thing for you to do. The GPcode virus uses a 1024 RSA key to encrypt contents. Kaspersky labs has a great forum where you can find out how much progress has been made, in multiple languages, might want to use Google or Bablefish to help translate. Along with antivirus companies around the world, we're faced with the task of cracking the RSA 1024-bit key. This is a huge cryptographic challenge. We estimate it would take around 15 million modern computers, running for about a year, to crack such a key. Of course, we don't have that type of computing power at our disposal. This is a case where we need to work together and apply all our collective knowledge and resources to the problem. So we're calling on you: crytographers, governmental and scientific institutions, antivirus companies, independent researchersjoin with us to stop Gpcode. This is a unique project - uniting brain-power and resources out of ethical, rather than theoretical or malicious considerations. Source: Virus List
Even if you know nothing about cryptography, but have an abiding interest, this could be worth visiting, doing, or joining to your ability and time constraints. This is a great project, code cracking can be fun, and you would be doing this for a good reason. The more interesting part is how this is turning into a grass roots process, get a bunch of very smart crypto folks to come up with a process to crack a key, then let everyone else run the software that will help crack the key. What will really be of interest is when the key is cracked, are the statistics off the process, how many people, how many hours, to actually break the thing. This will be a definitive number, we will truly know how long it takes to get to the center of the 1024 encryption key set given a known set of variables. This could be the coolest project this year. Comments About the Author: Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community. |
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