The best advertising Bitcoin - from Pavel Durov

The patron of Telegram , Pavel Durov, will pay $ 200,000 in BTC to the first person to crack the encrypted protocol of his messenger. Starting from today, Pavel (+79112317383) will send Nikolay (+79218944725) a message every day containing a secret email address. To prove the decryption of the Telegram protocol and to claim the prize, you will need to send a letter to this secret address.

Your email must contain:
- The full text of the message, which contained the secret address
- The address of your bitcoin wallet to get 200 thousand dollars
- Detailed description of the attack

Paul's incoming and outgoing traffic encrypted by Telegram is publicly available on this page . You can send messages via Telegram and watch its traffic in real time.

In order to prove that the competition is really fair and fair, we will publish the keys necessary to decrypt the traffic as soon as the winner is announced. In case the winner is not before March 1, 2014, the keys for decryption will be published on the same day.
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A topic would not be complete without these links:
Post alizar about this news, at that time the rules of the competition were not yet known
Discussion on Ycombinator
Updated Telegram FAQ
Criticism of the cryptographic merits of the messenger
Some information about the competition in Russian in TJournal

PS: Pavel Durov says that if the winner does not want to receive a prize in Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies, he can receive it in dollars:

Useful UPD:

Telegram development team published FAQ on the contest .

1. Why competition?
To identify the vulnerability of the algorithm or to obtain indirect evidence of its persistence.

2. What happens if someone wins?
If we have a winner of the current competition, we will start a new one with a big prize, but first we fix the protocol.

3. What is access to?
You have access to a detailed description of the encryption system that we use, the source code of the application and Paul’s full traffic log, from its registration to the current day, updated in real time. You need to decrypt a secret email from a daily message from Pavel Nicholas, and send a description of a successful attack to this address.

4. What is the traffic structure?
The structure is as follows:
Unixtime Length-in-bytes Direction (in/out) ServerIP:Port Hexdump.
For your convenience, only high bytes of the TCP stream are shown, ignoring IP packet boundaries, and TCP / IP headers are missing.

5. Daily message - the same thing every day?
No, as in real life, it may be slightly different. The only thing that is constantly is the email address being sent.

6. Can you give an example message?
Of course. It may look like this: Hi Kohl, here is a secret email for hunters for money - {here email address} .

7. I want to try to take part in the contest, how to do it?
At this stage, you can try to analyze the traffic, send modified packets to the server, that is, to conduct attacks on exceeding the length of the message, retries, and so on. In case no one can achieve victory in the current competition (decrypt the Telegram protocol) until March 2014, we are going to facilitate the task and provide participants with tools for more complex active attacks.

8. What if I don’t trust Bitcoins and don’t want them as a prize?
If the winner prefers the usual currency, we will gladly transfer him $ 200,000 instead of BTC.

9. Only 2.5 months left, I need more time!
The contest for breaking the encrypted Telegram protocol is a permanent feature of our project. Now we will always launch a new contest immediately after the previous one, and each time the prize amount will grow. So the first to break the protocol will be able to demand a prize, even if the current competition is completed.