Author Topic: Distributed Projects  (Read 1699 times)

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sopadeajo

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Distributed Projects
« on: June 16, 2008, 02:35:10 AM »
Recently Kaspersky company found a new virus that encrypted  your hard disk files using a RSA key of lengh 1024 bits, that is 1024*log2=309 digits. kaspersky asked for a collective effort to crack it (for the purpose of recovering the encrypted data).

A RSA key is a number (in this case of 308 or 309 decimal digits) which is simply the product of 2 primes of about the same number of digits (154 each).
You have to factorize (find the 2 primes) to crack RSA encryption, but the estimated time to do that is of 1 million modern PC´s working  together  24 hours of a day for 15 years. That´s too much time for a distributed and very interesting project.

See:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/06/kaspersky_labs.html
« Last Edit: June 16, 2008, 03:22:03 AM by sopadeajo »

Offline Lisandro

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Re: Distributed Projects
« Reply #1 on: June 16, 2008, 05:47:16 PM »
Has been posted before... If I'm not wrong, avast has already added a kind of detection of it.
Keep avast on and updated! There is no 'cure' in this case.
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