The ECCp-109 Challenge is a distributed computing project which is tackling one of the various challenges issued by Certicom. Certicom has put forth numerous challenges, with monetary prizes, to test the strength of various elliptic curve cryptography logarithms.
The ECCp-109 Challenge's goal is to decrypt the 109-bit message and collect the $10,000 prize ($8000 will go to the Free Software Foundation and (2) $1000 prizes will go to the participants whose computers are responsible for the final solution). Participants in the challenge are required to download a piece of software which will use spare computing cycles to help find the winning solution. Participants then upload their results to the server which will filter them and look for the final solution.
This project started on April 14th, 2001 and will end when the final solution is found and approved by Certicom. It is expected that the project will find a solution by February 2003.
The search is being organized by Chris Monico and is supported by the University of Notre Dame.
More detailed information, and the software client, can be found on the official website of the project: http://www.nd.edu/~cmonico/eccp109/