DES Challenges

Part of the EFF's DES cracking machine which was used in two of the challenges

The DES Challenges were a series of contests created by RSA Security for the purpose of highlighting the security provided by the Data Encryption Standard.

The first challenge began in 1997 and was solved in 96 days by the DESCHALL Project.

DES Challenge II-1 was solved by distributed.net in 41 days in early 1998.

DES Challenge II-2 was solved in just 56 hours by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with their purpose-built Deep Crack machine. The prize for the contest was US$10,000 whilst the machine cost US$250,000 to build. The contest demonstrated how quickly a rich corporation or government agency, having built a similar machine, could decrypt ciphertext encrypted with DES.

DES Challenge III was completed as a joint effort between distributed.net and Deep Crack. The key was found in just 22 hours 15 minutes.

See also

• RSA Factoring Challenge
• RSA Secret-Key Challenge