Is the wine slipping away??? ...not sure..stay tuned

The team unfortunately didn’t get as much figured out this week as I’d hoped; though some progress was made. John and I were able to meet on Sunday evening and continued working on our algorithm, but we really wanted to get together with Jonathan and Ben to make sure we’re all on the same page. We haven’t been able to meet with Jonathan yet, (he just got into the class full time because of work constraints), but John and I did meet with Ben Lawry this evening. After we got up to speed on where we are in the project, we continued formulating our algorithm and writing code in order to brute-force K3; this is the obvious first-step in finding the key, and the one we’ve known about for a while now.
I received an e-mail from diabloo71@yahoo.com, which broke down his algorithm for breaking K3 and his, proposed, steps for continuing up the feistel structure to get K1 and K2. We compared his pseudo code to our own and I *THINK* we’re on the right track; we seem to have the same basic technique to solve the problem. We did receive new S-Boxes from the professor this evening, and they appear to be more linear and, in his opinion, easier to crack. We'll hopefully be able to confirm this when running our *working* code on the plaintext/ciphertext pairs...but I give no guarantees.
John and I did discuss the lab briefly at work today, and John made a comment that we should get threads on one of our work’s super computers in order to brute-force the entire structure…maybe not a bad idea when your employer has two of the top-10 super computers in the world. =)
We came to the conclusion that this would probably be too expensive and we probably wouldn’t even be able to run our code on the machines. Oh well….it was an idea.
Code is now being written on my laptop, which now has Fedora core 10 64-bit on it. I put the code on my personal laptop because I can now take it anywhere with me; I won’t have to find somewhere to SSH into UNM anymore. I aptly named the file: “rubberHose.cpp” for obvious reasons. I’d be lying if I said that I’m not getting a little pessimistic about actually completing the lab, but I’m sure quite a few others in the class are feeling the same way right about now. I’m going spend a great-deal more time on the project this weekend, and I’m now anxiously awaiting version 3 from the professor. ;)