[82065] in Cypherpunks
Re: HACKERS SMASH U.S. GOVERNMENT ENCRYPTION
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Emery)
Thu Jun 19 19:21:05 1997
From: Dave Emery <die@pig.die.com>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.2.32.19970619093902.00759df0@popd.ix.netcom.com> from "Bill Stewart" at "Jun 19, 97 09:39:02 am"
To: stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 18:09:14 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: Dave Emery <die@pig.die.com>
Bill Stewart wrote :
> On the other hand, DES really is _much_ weaker than the DESCHALL
> project indicates - Intel CPUs aren't at all tuned for DES cracking,
> whereas a custom DES-cracker with similar horsepower could have
> done the job a lot faster. If I remember right, Wiener's design
> used 64,000 chips, about as many as there were PCs working DESCHALL,
> for a crack that would take hours instead of months.
The way I like to look at it, it should be easy these days to do
a compiled custom chip deeply pipelined enough to try one key per
clock. And ASICs running at 200 mhz aren't that uncommon these days.
That is one key every 5 nanoseconds, or .2 billion keys a second, thus
only aout 40 of these chips ( a medium size board's worth which could
sit in a single PC slot) could equal the maximum rate the huge
distributed cracked attained as documented in Sameer's press release.
Dave Emery
die@die.com
