[ Thanks to Stefane
Fermigier for this link. ]
From the ECC2K-108
Home page:
“The plan:
- Solve part of Certicom’s ECC challenge.
- Win $10000 and give most of it to the Apache Software Foundation.
- Um, that’s it.
We’ve got some awesome machines and are capable of solving big
problems if a large enough percentage of us are mobilised. We have
solved the first seven problems in the Certicom ECC challenge, but
this next problem is by far the hardest yet.
For comparison: it requires roughly as much computation as a DES
crack, which is much more than the recently completed RSA-155
factorisation. But we use an interesting parallel algorithm like
the RSA-155 factorisation rather than an exhaustive search like
DES.
We need to find distinguished points on a certain
elliptic curve until the same point is found in two different ways
and then the solution can be computed easily. Each point takes 1.4
billion elliptic curve operations on average and it is estimated
that a matching pair will be found after about 1.3 million
points.
Certicom is offering a prize of $10000 for the first correct
solution. If we win it, $1000 will go to each of the two people
who find the match and we will donate the remaining $8000 to the
Apache Software Foundation. Note that following our previous
successes, we have already donated $12000 to the Free Software Foundation.”