$10,000 Challenge: PMC will pay $10,000 to anyone who can crack their cipher.
 It's true! We pay $10.000 to the first to break our 512 bit Polymorphic Cipher implemented in their encryption software: TurboCrypt. All you have to do is to send us an e-mail with a password that decrypts the volume file which can be downloaded here!
The 4MB image file contains data, but also several hundred kilobytes of known plaintext (0x00, 0x00, ..., 0x00). The first 512 bytes represent the file header and are not part of the encrypted data. So if you want to employ statistical methods, omit the first sector (512 bytes). The image file contains a complete FAT 16 file system.
Anybody can participate in this challenge! Simply download and install our Free Edition of TurboCrypt and start hacking! Download TurboCrypt here
The challenge has started on April 18, 2004.
It's going to be a little tricky. That's for sure. We are of course very confident that we can keep the money.
It is likely that the full keyspace was used during encryption. This would then be 512 bit. The Polymorphic Cipher is a combined secrecy system that provides as many different ciphers as different keys are available in a certain keyspace. This constructs exponentially many conceptually different ciphering functions which opponents must engage in order to successfully crack the Polymorphic Cipher. Being able to choose from 2512 ciphers for a 512 bit encryption algorithm has the advantage that it renders all known attacks that require a static system inapplicable.
You can try with Brute Force:
It all depends on how much money you want to afford to break the cipher and how much time you want to spend:
If the cipher and the hash generator proves to be more than just pretty good, you have to try 2511 different password combinations with a probability of 50% to break the code. Let's assume that your computer spends a nanosecond on checking one of the possible passwords (the microprocessor would have to run at 1000GHz or even faster), you'll have the following problems to overcome:
There are 2511 different password combinations to try. This would take a single supercomputer (as described above) 2511 / 109 seconds, which is 6.70390396497*10144 seconds. This is a pretty long time! The number looks much more nice if converted to the number of years it takes to crack the code: 6.70390396497*10144 / (365days * 24hours * 60minutes * 60seconds) = 2.125794*10137 years.
To be honest, this is just a little longer than the projected remaining life time of the sun.
You're free to make friends, of course. On this planet there are approximately 6 billion people who could potentially take part in this challenge. If they would all take part, then the mean time to break the cipher would only be 3.54299*10127 years.
Honestly speaking, we hope that you don't find so many friends who want to share those $10.000. They'll certainly not participate just because of the money. Let's assume that your supercomputer only draws 100W of electric power and the price for that power would only be $0,01 per kWh. Every hour this juice would consequently cost $0.001. Each participant would have to pay $3.54299*10124 in the end. That's a lot of money! Much more than the GDP of all the economies in the world combined within the next trillion years!
Good luck!
Your PMC Ciphers team
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