Ghostwheel vs Weak Crypto

Ghostwheel, child of Shadow, master of Pattern and Logrus, Son of Merlin, invites you to join in the war for privacy in the shadow Earth. The freedom of the inhabitants of Merlin & Corwin's favorite shadow is in jeopardy, in a struggle of which the commoners are even nowunaware. Certain organizations that themselves hide within the shadows of a shadow have conspired to restrict Internet communication to the level of a 'digital postcard'. By limiting the strength of encryption that the humans can use, their communications are left in a state as easily readable to these conspirators as a vacation postcard. The only saving grace is that these restrictions are impossible to apply to the Trumps.

What can a Shadow Computer and a collection of Earth Mortals do to fight such tyranny? The only reasonable thing: embarrass those who profess that their standards are good enough 'for the people.' Publicly challenge and defeat this weak encryption and show the world how easily it was done.

A Shadow Earth business known as RSA Laboratories has sponsored a contest in which the goal is to repeatedly prove that DES encryption is a poor excuse for a joke. Not only will a repeated challenge of DES prove its worthlessness, but there is a cash prize involved. The power of Ghostwheel has been added to the collective at www.distributed.net, which is where you can find the specifics of the challenge and the prize.

Team Ghostwheel's only intention is to be a tribute to Rodger Zelazny and his creations. If your computer cracks the code, you get the money. It is not my intention for the Team to lay any claim to the success of its members.

Would you like to play the game, and offer tribute to one of the greatest authors of our time?

Note: The DES Challenege has concluded, and Distributed.Net has moved on to cracking RC5.

1. Visit the RC5 Challenge page to get more detail and phylosophy than I can empart here regarding the challenge.
2. Download the DES/RC5 Client that is appropriate for your system.
3. After you have been running the client long enough to show up in the stats, request a user password and join team 1862.

Detailed instructions can be found in the Team FAQ at Distributed.

Team Ghostwheel is slowly sinking... :(
I had to give up my rack of 49 Pentium drones, and we have slowly started sinking. Please help us turn the tide!

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me!
Christopher Knight