Victorinox, which manufactures the latest generation of knives, says that, as a result, its $100 000 prize for the USB knife-drive being cracked has gone unclaimed.
Victorinox says that, even if the cracked teams had come close to winning the competition, the knife's self-destruct security mechanism would have kicked in and destroyed the USB drive's data.
"We were so confident in the design and development of these devices, we were willing to put $100 000 on it", said Rick Taggart, Victorinox's president.
"The fact that no one was able to crack the code really demonstrates the unparalleled security of these new products", he added.
The Victorinox `Crack the Code' encryption cracking contest was open to registered 2010 CES attendees all four days during exhibit show floor hours.
Each participant had up to two hours to breach the encrypted security function on the device and, says the firm, the contest drew in a variety of participants, including journalists, analysts, gadget enthusiasts and security professionals from Connecticut to California, New York to Oregon.
The good news, Infosecurity notes, is that all 45 contest participants/teams received a special gift for their efforts.
The big question, of course, is whether anyone could have succeeded.
Bruce Schneier, the well-known IT security researcher, has blogged extensively on carefully crafted attacks on the 128-bit AES encryption algorithm and concluded that "cryptography is all about safety margins."
"If you can break n round of a cipher, you design it with 2n or 3n rounds. What we're learning is that the safety margin of AES is much less than previously believed", he said.
"And for new applications I suggest that people don't use AES-256. AES-128 provides more than enough security margin for the foreseeable future. But if you're already using AES-256, there's no reason to change."