Cracking RC5 with Java applets

The paper describes a distributed brute-force attack on RC5 cipher using Java applets. It introduces a novel model for long-term parallel computing based on the abstraction of solvers with limited lifetime. The associated problems and scheduling policy are discussed. The paper comments on the inherent performance problems of the Java Virtual Machine and presents performance measurements of the cipher breaking applet for several computing platforms. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.