Brute Forcing Encryption

[Andrew Schreiber]

A couple weeks ago there was a competition by EngineYard in which they challenged people to try to get hash collisions given a list of 1000 words and 5 arbitrary letters. Today I was reading through a thread and saw someone mention cracking the AES encryption on the game manual. So I was curious how often someone mentioned doing that, turns out someone mentions it pretty much every year when the encrypted manuals are released.

Now, I realize that discussion of illegal activities are illegal on this board, but I would assume that a good honest intellectual challenge is always appreciated. Here is the deal, I am going to post a phrase in various hashes (SHA1, MD5, and DES to be specific) I will give you one week to use whatever means you have at your disposal to either tell me the phrase or tell me a phrase that has a collision with the phrase.

Now, again I must cover my butt here and restate that the point of this exercise is NOT to teach how to crack encryptions. It is to encourage exploration of various encryption methods and how secure they are as well as writing efficient programs. If you just want to break things don't join in, this is for fun and learning, nothing more. The only prize is bragging rights and knowledge. One last requirement, if you get it you HAVE to describe how you cracked it so that others can learn. No secrets here (except for the actual phrase for the week)

So, now that my butt is thoroughly covered and I won't get myself banned(I HOPE) The hashes for this week are:

SHA1 Hash
3f900041799def330a812042b8ef4a6044fc2df6

DES
CRV3UuQ8DLxjM

MD5
c698abe95296466e1f339df792055192

This week's phrase is 12 characters long (shorter than the passwords for FIRST manuals) You can use any length string you like but my suggestion would be to limit yourself to strings of length 12 using the letters A-Z (upper and lower case) and spaces.

[to mods]
If this is against the rules I apologize, I felt that it was merely an intellectual challenge from which we may all benefit, please delete and just let me know so I know the bounds of what I can and cannot say.
[/mods]

Aside specifically to Joe Johnson re http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=41202
I have a feeling that this contest should have the opposite effect, it should let your mother rest easy knowing just how hard it is crack encryption.