RC5-64… We're Done!!!

I can’t believe I missed this. After 1,757 days and 58,747,597,657 work units being tested, the RC5-64 project has now been completed. The RC5-64 project is one of the largest distributed computing projects ever. Back in mid-July, a PIII-450 in Tokyo returned the winning key to the distributed.net keyservers. Only recently has it been discovered because of a breakage in scripts. The key (0x63DE7DC154F4D039) produces the plaintext output:

The unknown message is: some things are better left unread

Thanks to a good friend for introducing it to me, I’m very happy and proud to have been a part of it. You can find the official press release here and my personal RC5-64 stats page here.