From Jonathan L. Orwant Fri Sep 29 20:10:22 1989 Date: Fri, 29 Sep 89 15:27:13 EDT From: Jonathan L. Orwant To: amdehon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, arista@MEDIA-LAB.MEDIA.MIT.EDU, blount@MEDIA-LAB.MEDIA.MIT.EDU, kerr@AI.MIT.EDU, klee@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, lwvanels@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, orwant@MEDIA-LAB.MEDIA.MIT.EDU Subject: just a passing thought, Hubert... Pay close attention: ---------- Forwarded message begins here ---------- Return-path: Date: Tue, 26 Sep 1989 15:55:37 EDT From: LSMITH@B.PSC.EDU Message-Id: <890926155537.20406859@B.PSC.EDU> Subject: PSC Undergraduate Contest for Cray Time STUDENT CONTEST FOR FREE SUPERCOMPUTER TIME The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is holding its second annual supercomputing contest for undergraduates, and we would like you to enter! The PSC is offering five awards of 1.5 Service Units of CRAY Y-MP/832 computer time (approximately one hour of CPU time) to students. The Y-MP has a peak calculation rate of 2.7 billion floating point operations per second and 32 million 64-bit words of main memory. The Y-MP runs the UNIX operating system. FORTRAN, C, and PASCAL vectorizing compilers are available, as well as many third-party software packages. WHO CAN WIN Any full-time, undergraduate college student who has access to the INTERNET, CCNET (DECNET) or BITNET networks, or has access to a dial-out modem, or can commute to the PSC to use our facilities can win. HOW TO ENTER To enter the contest, simply send: * Your name, student id number, U.S. Mail address, and, if possible, an electronic mail address * A short response to the question "What would I do with an hour of Cray time?" * A signed letter of reference (a few lines are sufficient) from a faculty member familiar with your computing talents Send your entry materials to: Lori Smith Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center 4400 Fifth Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Your entry must be received on or before October 13, 1989. Winners will be notified on October 20, 1989. All winners are required to attend two meetings, located at the PSC: October 24: Cray Account information will be presented. February 20: Each student will give a 10-minute presentation of his/her progress. Meeting times will be planned in order to accomodate student schedules. If you have questions or require additional information, please contact Lori Smith, PSC User Consultant, at 412-268-4960. ------- End Forwarded Message Received: by ATHENA-PO-3.MIT.EDU (5.45/4.7) id AA28220; Fri, 29 Sep 89 11:33:37 EDT Received: from CHARON.MIT.EDU by MIT.EDU with SMTP id AA02942; Fri, 29 Sep 89 11:32:25 EDT Received: by CHARON.MIT.EDU id AA06153; Fri, 29 Sep 89 11:32:45 EDT Date: Fri, 29 Sep 89 11:32:45 EDT From: amdehon@MIT.EDU (Andre' DeHon) Message-Id: <8909291532.AA06153@CHARON.MIT.EDU> To: lsmsa@MIT.EDU, sipb@MIT.EDU Cc: klee@MIT.EDU, orwant@MIT.EDU, arista@MIT.EDU, awblount@MIT.EDU, lwvanels@MIT.EDU Subject: [CNDEHON%nlu.edu@RELAY.CS.NET: 1,000,000 yen] Usnail: 3 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139 Phone: dorm: (617) 225-6387 office: (617) 253-2657 Organization: Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) ------- Forwarded Message Date: Tue, 26 Sep 89 15:15 CST From: CNDEHON%nlu.edu@RELAY.CS.NET Subject: 1,000,000 yen To: andre@MIT.EDU Are you still conversent with cryptology? Nippon Telegraph and Telephone is offering 1 million yen ($7K) to anyone that manages to break into the encoding system it uses to transmit financial data via telephone lines. The system is called the FEAL-8 encoding system. NTT America, Inc. will run the contest til Aug. 1991. How much spare time do you have???? Cheers, Rene ------- End Forwarded Message Where/when do we start? IAP project? :-)/2 Andre' ------- End Forwarded Message Hmmmm....can you figure out a possible connection between these two messages? I knew you could. -Jon 3. 1,000,000 yen: The NTT, America contest was a short blurb in a publication called "INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH". Unforetunately, I threw my copy away to make room for other stuff. I"ll try to get a copy from one of the other profs. The contact point is Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, America Inc. You'll have to do your own detective work to find a telephone number. SInce it is a formal contest, I assume there are at least some explanations available from the company. From CNDEHON%nlu.edu@RELAY.CS.NET Sat Sep 30 21:46:35 1989 Date: Sat, 30 Sep 89 12:29 CST From: CNDEHON%nlu.edu@RELAY.CS.NET Subject: 1M yen To: ANDRE@MIT.EDU Correction--the source is a recent issue of Research and Development, but not the Sept. issue. From Mark W. Eichin Tue Oct 3 14:45:28 1989 Date: Mon, 2 Oct 89 17:43:02 EDT From: Mark W. Eichin To: simsong@PROSE.CAMBRIDGE.MA.US Cc: amdehon@MIT.EDU In-Reply-To: simsong@prose.cambridge.ma.us (Simson L. Garfinkel) 2 Oct 89 01:28:55 EDT (Mon) <8910020128.AA12150@prose.cambridge.ma.us> Subject: Re: [CNDEHON%nlu.edu@RELAY.CS.NET: 1,000,000 yen] If they are only offering 1,000,000 yen, they must not be very confident with their encryption scheme. -simson They're not. In fact, according to the specific rules, you're only allowed to use certain attacks (since at the conference where they introduced it, apparently Shamir (I think) was there, and before the conference ended had announced a chosen-plaintext attack that could break it. See sci.crypt, I think some time in the last month...) _Mark_ From Mark W. Eichin Tue Oct 3 14:45:40 1989 Date: Mon, 2 Oct 89 17:47:32 EDT From: Mark W. Eichin To: simsong@PROSE.CAMBRIDGE.MA.US, amdehon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU Subject: Nippon Code Challenge (I found the reference...) From: hoptoad!gnu (John Gilmore) Newsgroups: sci.crypt Subject: Re: Nippon's code challenge Date: 6 Sep 89 08:51:41 GMT Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco Dr. Shoji Miyaguchi of NTT presented a cryptosystem called "FEAL-8" and a "call for attack" at Crypto '89. FEAL had previously been described in a Eurocrypt '87 paper; perhaps FEAL-8 is a modified version. It is a secret key system (as opposed to public key) and is cheap to implement with slow processors. However it is not very secure. Dr. Adi Shamir demonstrated a method of attack at Securicom '89 in March. The method involves a chosen plaintext attack. NTT published the algorithm and a set of four plaintext/ciphertext pairs. Anyone who can determine the key used to encipher those pairs can become a candidate for the prize (1 million yen, or a few thousand USdollars). The first candidate who solves a final confirmation puzzle wins the prize. The rules of the final confirmation are designed to weed out Shamir's method (you can have 5 samples of plaintext/ ciphertext pairs chosen by NTT and encoded in electronic code book mode, or you can supply 5 plaintexts which they will encode -- in cipher block chaining mode). My sketchy recollection of Shamir's method was that it involved feeding plaintexts through and then modifying them and seeing how the modified versions came out encrypted. This seems to require both electronic code book mode, and possibly interactive generation of plaintexts after seeing the ciphertexts from previous trials. The full method was never disclosed while I was around... For more details including the algorithm and samples to work on, contact: Dr. Shoji Miyaguchi NTT Communications and Information Processing Laboratories 1-2356 Take Yokosuka-shi Kanagawa-ken 238-03 Japan Telephone: +81 468 59 3377 Fax: +81 468 59 2582 -- John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com Love your country but never trust its government. -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania