DESCHALL Project
| Company type | Collective |
|---|---|
| Industry | Cryptography, Computer security |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Founder | Rocke Verser |
Area served | Internet volunteers worldwide |
Key people | Rocke Verser, Justin Dolske, Matt Curtin |
| Products | DES decryption software |
DESCHALL, an abbreviation for DES Challenge, was the pioneering collective to publicly decrypt a message secured with the Data Encryption Standard (DES). This achievement earned them the $10,000 reward offered by the inaugural DES Challenges initiated by RSA Security in 1997. The initiative was launched by computer scientist Rocke Verser, with support from Justin Dolske and Matt Curtin. They coordinated thousands of volunteers who operated software on their personal computers connected through the Internet. Their success was declared on June 18, merely 96 days after the challenge commenced on January 28.
Background
In the 1990s, attempting to exhaustively search the 72 quadrillion possible keys within a 56-bit DES key was deemed impractical. Verser had created an optimized algorithm suitable for standard personal computers and proposed harnessing unused processing capacity across numerous internet-linked devices. A server was established on a 486-based PS/2 machine equipped with 56MB of RAM, and the project was promoted via Usenet in late March. The client software rapidly evolved to accommodate various home computer platforms as well as some advanced 64-bit architectures.
The main rivals included SoINET, a Swedish collective, and a high-performance computing team at Silicon Graphics, with the latter leading until near the end of the effort. Additional groups relying on supercomputers abandoned participation due to network disruptions.
The Project
An idle 200 MHz Pentium processor could test roughly one million keys per second, implying a complete keyspace search would require about 2,285 years. Nonetheless, involvement expanded swiftly—78,000 unique IP addresses participated, with up to 14,000 distinct hosts active simultaneously on peak days. When the key was eventually uncovered, approximately one-quarter of the keyspace had been examined at a combined throughput near 7 billion keys per second, with participant numbers still increasing.
The plaintext solution discovered was:
Strong cryptography makes the world a safer place.
The individual whose computer located the key received $4,000 from the prize pool; the remaining amount was awarded to project founder Verser.
The outcome demonstrated that exhaustive brute-force searching of DES keys is not only achievable but becoming increasingly accessible for groups with limited resources. RSA’s $10,000 incentive highlighted that DES no longer provides sufficient security for protecting sensitive information.
See also
- Brute Force: Cracking the Data Encryption Standard
- distributed.net
- RSA Factoring Challenge
- RSA Secret-Key Challenge