Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2000
The $10,000 ECC2K-108 challenge, created by Certicom (http://www.certicom .org/) to test the security of certain types of elliptical curve cryptosystems, has been solved. The effort to break the 108-bit encryption system was led by Irish mathematician Robert Harley, and by Damien Doligez, Daniel de Rauglaudre, and Xavier Leroy of the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA). The project also recruited help from Internet newsgroups, mailing lists, and web sites. All in all, 1300 volunteers in 40 countries downloaded Harley's software and used it to contribute their computers' idle-time power to solving the problem. An estimated 9500 machines were involved in the computation.
The attack on ECC2K-108 used a brute-force computation requiring four months to complete. The success of the challenge supports the current theory regarding the security of elliptic curve cryptography: Certicom predicted that the challenge could be solved in a few months. For security applications, Certicom recommends key sizes of at least 160 bits. Solving a 163-bit ECC challenge is estimated to require about 100 million times the work expended to solve the 108-bit challenge.
Nine-thousand dollars of the prize money will be donated to the Apache Software Foundation to support development of the Apache open-source web server software package. For more details on the ECC challenge, see http://www.certicom .com/research/ecc_challenge.html.
It seems straight out of the movie "p" (Pi) -- the one where a mathematician cracks the stock market and for his trouble gets hunted by everyone from sinister corporate suits to Cabala-inspired mystics. But Dr. Thomas Cover, professor of statistics and electrical engineering at Stanford University, claims to have created an algorithm that invariably delivers the best possible investment portfolio.
A constant rebalanced universal portfolio begins with an even distribution of wealth across the entire stock market (like an index fund), then rebalances the money daily to keep the emphasis on the highest return investments. Cover's algorithm, which stems from his work in game theory, takes this one step further: It maps a sphere of all possible rebalanced portfolios, and selects the one at the center. The concept is similar to that used in data-compression algorithms. Since a universal portfolio invests in all stocks, some will inevitably lose money; but because the best-performing stocks grow exponentially, the profits overwhelm the losses.
Cover may soon be able to put his money where his math is: "I've been approached recently about forming a small company (which would be called Mountain View Analytics if it were to be formed) to implement the universal portfolio and its consequences." For more information, see http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/ pr/00/universal412.html.
The Science Museum in London, England, has unveiled the first complete printer based on the design blueprints of the 19th-century inventor and mathematician, Charles Babbage. The invention of the difference engine and printer, which he began working on in 1821, was inspired by Babbage's frustration with the constant errors he found in manually produced mathematical tables for navigation, science, engineering, and banking.
A team of engineers at the museum first constructed the Babbage Difference Engine, which was completed in 1991. It weighs three tons and consists of some 4000 parts. The printer weighs in at two and a half tons and also has about 4000 parts.
The printer automatically prints the results of a calculation and even has formatting features for specifying line height, margin width, and the number of columns. The printer supports line wrapping and can print in two fonts simultaneously. In addition to paper output, the printer produces stereotype plates for use in a conventional printing press.
Coinciding with the completion of the printer, Coron Swade, assistant director of the Science Museum, has completed a book about Charles Babbage, entitled The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, to be published by Little, Brown, later this year. For more information, see the Science Museum's web site at http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/.
Xerox PARC has implemented a language called XrML (eXtensible Rights Markup Language) for use in attaching a wide variety of conditions to the electronic access of digital content (conditions such as one-time purchase, fixed number of copies, view-only, component access, license contracts, and so forth). Xerox PARC is offering XrML on a royalty-free license basis. The specification and evaluation copies of the language are available from http://www.xrml.org/.
XrML is based on an earlier Xerox PARC specification language called "DPRL," short for "Digital Property Rights Language." DPRL was first described in the article "Digital Content & Intellectual Property Rights," by Arun Ramanujapuram and Prasad Ram, in the December 1998 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is clearly a concern of online digital content distributors, and standards emerging for assigning digital rights. To this end, Xerox PARC has spun off a company called "Contentguard" (http://www.contentguard .com/) in the hopes of establishing XrML as the standard for DRM.
Joining in, Microsoft has invested in the company (in the "tens of millions," according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer), and plans to use Contentguard in all of its products, starting with electronic books based on Microsoft Reader, due out later this year. Contentguard claims that over 20 companies are backing XrML, including Adobe, HP, Microsoft, and of course, Xerox. Notably absent are companies such as Sun and Oracle, who likely will propose standards of their own.
Phil Katz, the founder of PKWare and author of the popular PKZIP/PKUNZIP file compression utility, passed away on April 14, 2000, at the age of 37. After working briefly as a software design engineer developing programmable logic controllers for the industrial automation industry, Katz founded PKWare in 1986. PKWare became one of the most prominent shareware software companies with the introduction of PKZip, one of the most widely used file-compression utilities for x86-based PCs. His family would appreciate memorials to the charity of your choice.