Project CSC: key found

The CSC Project is over. On 16 January 2000, shortly before 0630 GMT, we received the winning key (00438EF36FE3FC21 for you tech junkies) from a Sparc in the United States. The secret message was:

CS-Cipher a ete presente en mars 97 a 'Fast Software Encryption' (PARIS). Congratulations to the winner!

The Winner is Paul Ilardi, a graduate student at the University of Rochester. Congratulations to Paul!

We're going to leave some of the pages below on-line for nostalgia.

• project launch announcement
• preliminary completion announcement

an introduction to the CSC effort

distributed.net is leading a new cryptographic effort to crack a 56-bit key and decrypt a message that has been encrypted with the CS Cipher.

The CS-Cipher Challenge is organized by CS Communications & Systems and will last until March 17, 2000. It is meant to demonstrate how weak a 56-bit key is against brute force attacks. A 10,000 Euros prize is at stake, so download a client and start cracking those CS keys!

The CS-Cipher Algorithm is a symmetric block cipher, meaning that the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt the message. The algorithm supports variable key lengths ranging from 0 to 128 bits and handles message encryption and decryption in fixed-size 64 bit blocks.