To All - Article in today's New York Times - one error - wrong date for the end of the contest, it's July 28, not July 31.
The New York Times, Thursday, July 23, 1998
News Watch
Steven E. Brier
Decoding Jackpot is $5 Million, But You'd Better Get Started
Psst-want to break some code and make a cool $5 million? All you have to do is decode a document of unknown length encoded with a 4,096-bit key, and then tell us how you did it. By July 31. And-oh, yeah-then you have to do it again to win the money.
That is the challenge posted by Jaws Technology, a Canadian company trying to make a mark for itself in the field of encryption. Several other encrypted files have been decoded recently, including one last week by a two-person team, working with a privacy rights organization, the Electronic Frontier-Foundation: they used a specialized computer built for $250,000. That file used Standard DES, the code recommended for businesses by the Federal Government and a 56-bit key, a piece of code that determines how the encryption algorithm works. The winner of that contest tried 17,902,806,669,197,312 keys, or about 25 percent of all the possible communications that could be generated by the original 56-bit code.
The Jaws file was encrypted by a new program using a 4,096-bit key. There are, needless to say, quite a few more combinations with a 4,096-bit encryption key.
Robert Kubbernus, the chief executive of Jaws Technology, said that there were problems with existing encryption programs.
"Current standards aren't good enough," Mr. Kubbernus said, "so we took it right off the charts to make sure ours was."
Because his company is Canadian, it hopes to attract international buyers eager to avoid the current brouhaha over Clinton Administration encryption policy.
About that $5 million? Mr. Kubbernus does not expect to have to pay out. The contest has been running for about two months and ends in another week. If the first message is decoded, it has to be verified with an outside auditor. Then a second message has to be decoded within 60 days. If that is done, the person has to tell Jaws Technology how it was done. Only then will the money appear.
"If someone can break this, we want to know how it was done," Mr. Kubbernus said. "We also want to offer them a job."
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