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Afterpiece

Later in the spring while working on Stage 10 we were a little bit worried about the evolving group efforts to solve Stage 9. We knew we had quite some time to go before we had the solution at hand, and also that the more people having the solution to Stage 9, the greater the competition would be. At this point, Fredrik actually joined the TCBCrackStage9 group in order to stay in the group and get accepted into the TCB_TFF group. He also reported one block since that was necessary to stay in the group and get accepted into the TCB_TFF group.

Since we had the correct key in our possession, we calculated what block it would be in and fed that block number to the TCBCrackStage9 team's DES cracker program. This did not work! We happlily concluded that they would not find the solution using that program, which turned out to be true. As we all know, they later fixed the problem and found the key anyway.

We are sure a very interesting discussion would have taken place within our team if it had turned out that Fredrik had been assigned the correct block. Would we have wanted to report the key?


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