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This message is copyright Robert J. Harley, 1997.
If you wish to quote more than one sentence, please quote the whole thing.
To: certicom-ecc-challenge@certicom.com
Robert J. Harley,
Se`vres, France,
6th of December, 1997.
Dear Anonymous,
Certicom's professed aim in setting its ECC challenge is to encourage
research into secure cryptosystems based on elliptic curve discrete
logarithms. Yet Certicom is a member of the Key Recovery Alliance, a
lobby group whose purpose is to promote the use of back-doors allowing
supposedly secure communications to be intercepted. How are these
contradictory positions reconciled?
The solution to your ECCp-79 problem is the residue class of
92221507219705345685350 modulo 466597814831947642887217. It was found
by Wayne Baisley and myself using several Digital Alpha workstations
running Linux and Digital Unix at the Institut National de Recherche
en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA), at Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory and at the California Institute of Technology
C.S. Department.
The method used was a "birthday paradox" algorithm iterating from a
random initial point (one per machine) with a random function (the
same on all machines) until a collision was detected at 17:58 today at
INRIA, Rocquencourt, France by a 500MHz Linux machine. This machine
did 25 billion elliptic curve operations per day. The peak rate of
all machines was approximately 6 six times as much. A total of about
1400 billion iterations were performed.
If this is the first correct submission, please send the prize (a copy
of "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" and Maple software) to the
following address:
Robert Harley,
c/o Sylvie Loubressac,
Projet CRISTAL,
INRIA,
Domaine de Voluceau - Rocquencourt,
78153 Le Chesnay,
France.
Thank you,
Rob.
.-. Robert.Harley@inria.fr .-.
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`-' Linux + 500MHz Alpha + 256MB SDRAM = heaven `-'
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