Tech Students "Crack the Code"

[Editor's Note: More information about Team Enygma is available on their website at www.nmt.edu/~nfaphun. This article does not touch on the current hot topic concerning computer-coded cryptography--federal government regulations which are currently being considered by Congress to limit the exportation of 64-bit coding technology unless a key is provided to government agencies. Hill, Simons, and other members of Team Enygma are willing to also discuss this particular aspect of coding in more detail if you contact them directly through addresses and phone numbers available on their website.]

SOCORRO, NM, April 3, 1998 -- A group of computer users on the New Mexico Tech campus has pooled its collective computing power to take on the formidable task of deciphering encrypted messages encoded with long strings of binary numbers--blocks of ones and zeros--which can sometime involve trying 72 quadrillion or more possible combinations to unlock a specific security code.

"Team Enygma," as the cooperative-computing collaboration is known, has for the past few months been using the "idling time," or time when the computers aren't normally being used, to take on several code-breaking challenges mounted by RSA Data Security, a computer software company which specializes in securing electronic data transmissions.

By linking together the raw power of more than 200 ordinary office and personal computers, Team Enygma co-leaders and co- founders Jon "Code Poet" Hill and Nathan "Enygma" Simons have used distributive computing methods to crunch through all the possible combinations in an effort to find the one winning password, or "key," which decodes the secret message.

Two of the code-breaking competitions Team Enygma has participated in the past year include RSA-sponsored challenges to crack the codes of 56-bit level of encryptions based on the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which for over 20 years has been the standard for government and commercial computer cryptography around the world.

DES, a top-security code developed by IBM in 1977 for the U.S. Government, is still currently being used to protect bank transactions, credit card records, electronic mail, and other secret communications in the United States, but RSA and other computer businesses believe the encryption standard offers inadequate protection against determined codebreakers.

To prove their point, RSA mounted several code-breaking challenges over the past year and the vulnerability of 56-bit security codes was confirmed twice as distributed.net, a consortium formed through the Internet to coordinate large, distributed processing efforts, decrypted the encoded messages with a massive combined computing power of over 50,000 computers throughout the world during off-hours or otherwise idle time.

Even so, the original DES challenge took 140 days to solve, while a subsequent challenge ended in 39 days--not that long a time when one considers the 72 quadrillion (That's 72 followed by 24 zeros!) possible keys which need to be searched through in a quest for that one right one.

Team Enygma joined the distributed.net (or Bovine group, as it's affectionately known on the Internet) decryption efforts last fall, but fell short of actually finding the mind-numbing mathematical equations, or algorithms, which were the winning keys.

Nevertheless, it currently is hard at work on solving an even more complicated 64-bit of encryption, which government agencies are considering using--among several other possibilities--as the new standard for computer security systems for the next 20 to 30 years.

And, on a decidedly positive note, the team, composed largely of New Mexico Tech students, has fared well overall in the previous competitions, posting respectable statistics for their collective-computing endeavors.

Of the more than 1,400 teams which comprise the Bovine group, Team Enygma usually ranks among or near the top 100 in terms of keys checked with their relatively small network of computers.

On the average, the team tests more than 12 million keys per second and has reached speeds surpassing 33 million keys per second in hopes of "cracking the code."

In comparison, these speeds have allowed them to surpass schools such as Harvard, MIT, Cambridge University, Virginia Tech, and the University of Wisconsin, and, on occasion, even large-scale computer businesses such as DEC.

"Although the difficulty of solving these decoding challenges grows exponentially as you move up to 64-bit encryption, I think it'll be solved sometime in 1998," says Hill, a New Mexico Tech junior majoring in mathematics and computer science. "It's really not a question of whether or not these codes can be broken, but rather is just a question of when."

Hill, who also is a systems programmer with the New Mexico Tech Computer Center, has written most of the software that automates the distributive computing program which ties together all of Team Enygma's computers.

Simons, who is a sophomore computer science major at New Mexico Tech, points out that most of the computers which comprise Team Enygma are personal computers with Intel architecture, but vary widely in operating systems and abilities.

"The moment someone logs on to use their computer, the Team Enygma link-up to that computer shuts itself down," Simons says. "So, as far as computer time goes, homework and term papers will always take precedence over Team Enygma's efforts."

But even with homework due and deadlines for term papers coming up, Team Enygma has managed to recycle the idle time of more than 200 computers on the New Mexico Tech campus to work toward a common goal: deciphering a 64-bit code.

Instead of consuming all that spare computational capacity on flying toasters, virtual aquariums, or other screen savers, all the participating computers' CPUs are now linked together in an international showcase of raw computing power.

After slightly more than 145 days spent working on RSA's latest challenge in which nearly 2,000 teams are competing, Team Enygma has once again managed to stay near the contest's prestigious "top 100 teams," with the most recent ranking placing them at 139th with over 100 trillion keys checked.

In comparison, a team from IBM is only two slots ahead of New Mexico Tech's Team Enygma, yet has spent six more days checking keys.

It's just a matter of time before the code is cracked.