The UNB Crytography Group helped in the international effort to crack the ECC-p 97bit Elliptic Curve encryption algorithm. Using a large number of computers working together in a distributed computing system, and using a "birthday paradox" algorithm iterating from random initial points (distributed over all machines) with a pseudo-random function.

ECC-p97 RESULTS

The solution to Certicom's ECCp-97 problem is the residue class of 1 6C86AA7C ACF69F1D D28B3E2F modulo 1 6EA1595E D21AE98F B6CCA20D. The calculation was carried out in 53 days by a group of 588 people and 1288 machines in more than 16 countries. It was found after 186,364 Distinguished Points. At an expected 2^30 iterations per Point, the ECC-p97 coordinators estimated it took 200 trillion (200 E12) iterations. The entire effort sustained an average rate of 5 trillion ( 5 E12) iterations per day, for the past two weeks.

A collision was detected at 23:38 GMT on Monday 16th of March 1998. The two Points were coincidentally both found by Greg Thomas on two different AlphaServer 8200s, each with four 440MHz 21164A Alpha CPUs.

This effort was organised by the BT Labs team, led by Adrian Escott, John Sager, Alex Selkirk & Dimitris Tsapakidis and by the Linux Alpha group, led by Robert Harley at INRIA.

TEAM UNB STATISTICS

Updated every 10mins, last at Fri Mar 20 3:30:24 1998

ECCp-97 CONTEST IS OVER!

unb

• Points: 222
• Contribution: 0.11%
• Machines: 12

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