A code developed for wireless networking has been successfully cracked by a mathematician from Indiana's University of Notre Dame and the combined computational power of 10,000 computers.
Over a total of 549 days the huge number of machines combined with the know-how of a brilliant mathematician's work have managed to complete a challenge set by Certicom. The founder of Certicon has claimed: "Our technology is based on a very hard mathematical problem, so what we wanted to do is validate how difficult it really is", and validate they certainly did as the 109-bit key used in the test wasn't as complex as the 163-bit plus encryption used in their networking technology.
The Certicom founder commented on the difference between this test and what is actually used saying: "It would be about 100 million times harder (to break) than what was just done". The challenge originated in 1997 and has involved 247 teams and the majority of the prize money is to be donated to the Free Software Foundation. $2000 is also going to be shared between two key people who allowed their machines to be used to finally crack the code.
News source: Reuters
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