TheECCp-109 challengeis an internet distributed effort to solveCerticom’sECCp-109 cryptosystem. It will represent a new world record in Fp elliptic curve discrete log computation. At present, there are over 6100 users and 190 teams around the world participating!
Information security is intimately linked with current computational power. Solving challenges like this help to give an idea of what current computational power really is. Of course, it’s a trivial matter to shop around and see how many MIPS you can get for your dollar. But it’s another matter entirely to gauge the power of internet distributed computing. Certicom (and other crypto companies like RSA Security Inc.) understand this and issue these challenges both to show their confidence in the systems they distribute and to help gauge what can be considered secure with current algorithms and computer resources.
Certicom is offering USD $10,000 for the solution to this particular problem. But before you go nuts spending it, let me describe how this money will be distributed: exactly two machines will find the solution. What will happen is we’ll have a bunch of machines running around computing points on a particular elliptic curve. When two machines have computed the same point, we’ll have the solution, with very high probability. Each of the two people responsible for the final solution will get USD $1000, and the remaining USD $8000 will go to theFree Software Foundationwhich, among other things, helps to support theGNU Project.
