On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Robert Harley wrote:
> Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> >Well, then how about donating it to the Apache Software Foundation
>
> Darn. If you had brough it up before we could have done so, but now
> that I've mentioned the Free Software Foundation to several people I'm
> not going to back out.
>
> However if there is sufficient interest in this project then when
> it's done we could move on to the next one (which is 4 or 5 times
> harder with a prize of $10000).
>
> So far there are three people in the FoRK team: Wayne Baisley, Jesse
> Vincent and myself. That's a start but thirty people would be much
> better!
>
>
> This is the biggest Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm calculation
> ever, something like 20% of an exhaustive search of 56-bit DES. At
> the current rate with a handful of people, the project would take 18
> months. I'm about to announce it in some public fora so the rate
> should increase dramatically, perhaps ten-fold.
>
>
> Those who are interested should head over to:
> http://pauillac.inria.fr/~harley/ecdl6/
>
> This seems more worthwhile to me than running distributed.net's 64-bit
> RC5 thing (well it would, wouldn't it =:-) For a start it is actually
> mathematically interesting with real algorithms instead of just
> searching for a needle in a large hay-stack. It will also pay off
> quickly, in something like two months, with prize money going to a
> good cause.
>
> Good luck,
> Rob.
>
> PS: The source runs out-of-the-box or with slight tweaks on Linux,
> Solaris, *BSD, Digital Unix, Rhapsody etc. With a little porting
> effort it compiles on lots of other stuff. It's running on x86,
> Alpha, Sparc and ARM so far.
>
> There's a Windows NT binary for all x86 chips >= 486.
>