EngineYard SHA-1 Competition

A few weeks ago, EngineYard held a programming competition. Basically, the contest was to see who could get a SHA-1 hash closest to a given hash. I thought it might be fun to see how well I could do with a minimal implementation, so I coded up something in C.

My goal was not to write the most efficient program possible, but to see what results I could get from a reasonable design and no major optimizations. So, I wrote about 160 lines of C code, using OpenSSL for the hashing and the old K&R bit counting method. Depending on how long the message plaintext was, this got me about 1 to 1.5 million attempts per second per core on my 3.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo. The winning CPU-based entry, which was written by D. J. Bernstein, contained an optimized SHA-1 implementation and got around 10 million hashes per second per core. So, I was about an order of magnitude off, which seems reasonable to me.

It turns out the really fast implementations were all on GPUs. Both the winner and the runner up used Nvidia’s CUDA for fast GPGPU processing, which was cool to see.

I ran my program for most of the 30 hours of the competition. How did I do? My best result was 37 bits off of the goal, which put me 7 away from the winner.