OCTOBER 31, 2000

TARZANA, Calif., October 04 /PRNewswire/ -- Meganet Corporation of Encino, California, creator of Virtual Matrix Encryption (VME), will be hosting two lectures by Simon Singh, author of the ‘The Code Book,’ a bestseller, at the Meganet's booth #L5121 at Comdex 2000.  Scientific American called the Code Book, a popular history of the science of encryption, “An absorbing tale of codemaking and codebreaking over the centuries.”

“As a company that creates unbreakable data security technology, we’re delighted to be hosting these two events,” says Saul Backal, Meganet CEO and developer of VME.  “A better public understanding of encryption and privacy in the digital world is essential to the growth of the Internet economy.  Mr. Singh’s book makes a great contribution to that understanding.” 

Mr. Singh will speak about the Cipher Challenge, a set of ten encrypted messages to be found at the end of The Code Book. There was a prize of £10,000 for the first person to solve the Challenge.  The Challenge was officially solved on October 7, 2000, after one year and one month of arduous effort by codebreakers, amateur and professional, around the world.

Meganet’s Virtual Matrix Encryption technology, and its array of data security tools, represent a breakthrough in encryption by incorporating a completely new approach that uses a million (1,000,000) bit-key.  Most computer-based encryption techniques employ keys no larger than a few hundred bits, making some of these approaches vulnerable to an attack where a computer tries all possible combinations of bits in an effort to guess the key.  Meganet is offering its own Challenge to codebreakers at Comdex, with a $100,000 prize going to the first person that manages to break a message encrypted with VME. 

Meganet has offered numerous other challenges over the past three years, but nobody has ever broken a message encrypted with VME. More information about Meganet Corporation and the Virtual Matrix
Encryption can be found at: http://www.meganet.com