So a co-member of my team was doing some Googling and found this page http://distributed.amiga.org/ which had some disturbing accusations on the news section from back in February of last year.

What does the future hold? Obviously there is OGR-28 so you can continue to contribute as before (with the same client as for OGR-27). If you are still participating in the RC5-72 effort, please stop. It has become counterproductive for a number of reasons. First of all, besides the fact that the challenge has officially been dropped by RSA Labs themselves almost 7(!) years ago now, there is also the inescapable zeitgeist: the Snowden revelations have confirmed that RSA has accepted $10 million from the NSA [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG [/url] to secretly include a backdoor in their products as early as 2004 and therefore taints the company and any ongoing promotion through continueing with an RC5 effort. This is diametrically opposed to the original intent of their own challenges.

Does anyone have more details on this or information on the subject?

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If you are still participating in the RC5-72 effort, please stop. It has become counterproductive for a number of reasons. First of all, besides the fact that the challenge has officially been dropped by RSA Labs themselves almost 7(!) years ago now, there is also the inescapable zeitgeist:...

While RSA Labs has dropped support for the RC5 challenge Distributed.net has decided to "privately sponsor" the prize and continue running the project. You can read more about this at http://www.distributed.net/RC5.

...to secretly include a backdoor in their products as early as 2004 and therefore taints the company and any ongoing promotion through..

While I won't comment on these wild accusations I can say that there's no RSA Labs code in the upstream apps so there's can't be any RSA backdoor in them. If in doubt, you can audit the public source code available at http://www.distributed.net/source (including a github repo).

All in all, I don't see these statements as any reasons to stop contributing to the Distributed.net RC5-72 challenge.

-w