The codebreaking was part of a contest sponsored by RSA Data Security , which holds a dominant share of the encryption toolkit market. Part mathematical challenge and part marketing campaign, the competition urges contestants to crack various strengths of RSA's algorithms, which scramble plain text into unreadable ciphers. The point of the contest is to show that current government regulations restrict users to levels of encryption that are unsecure. For each bit, the number of possible key combinations increases by a factor of two. Germano Caronni of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich wrote the codebreaking software and posted it on the Internet for anyone who wanted to join his efforts.
Strong encryption is considered crucial to protect electronic privacy in the digital age.
Current U.S. government regulations allow vendors to export up to 56-bit encryption if the vendor agrees to build in a key recovery system that would help law enforcement officials decrypt messages implicated in criminal cases. Under current regulations, domestic use of encryption is unregulated. Inc. All rights reserved.