Notre
Dame post-doc Christopher Monico is being credited with solving
the largest arithmetic problem in history. That's his answer above.
The problem was posed by Certicom, a company that makes information
encryption software. Certicom challenged scientists, mathematicians
(like Monico), cryptographers and hackers to try to break one
of its encryption codes, termed an elliptic curve discrete logarithm.
To do so, Monico first announced on an online message board
that he was going to try to crack the code and that he needed
computing power. He eventually found more than 10,000 people willing
to download software he devised to link the volunteers' computers
together and crunch numbers using the machine's excess capacity.
It still took 549 days for the army of computers to come up with
the answer.
The contest included a prize of $10,000, but Monico announced
in advance that if he won he would donate $8,000 to the Free Software
Foundation and give two $1,000 prizes to two randomly selected
people who volunteered their computers.
Rather than revealing the vulnerability of Certicom's products,
Monico's answer actually validated them. The problem he solved
involved cracking a code to identify a single person's identity.
The company's full encryption products are about 100 million times
more complicated, the company's founder said.
