The RSA DES Challenge II consists of a series of challenges that will be posed to the cryptographic community.
The challenge will consist of the ciphertext that was produced by DES-encrypting some unknown plaintext message.

For each contest the unknown message will be preceded by three known blocks of text containing the 24-character phrase: "The unknown message is: ".
While the mystery text that follows will clearly be known to a few employees of RSA Data Security, the secret key actually used for the encryption will be generated at random and destroyed within the challenge-generating software.

The goal of each contest is for participants to recover the secret randomly-generated key that was used in the encryption in a faster time than that required for earlier challenges in the series.

The first contest will be posted on the home page of RSA's web site (http://www.rsa.com) on January 13, 1998 at 9:00 am Pacific time.

Distributed.net will be accepting the RSA DES II Challenge.

If you want to find out more about the DES contest, you may want to check out these sites first:

The RSA DES Challenge II home page

distributed.net - Project DES

Yahoo's RSA Secret Key Challenge listing!