[45767] in Cypherpunks
Re: What ever happened to... Cray Comp/NSA co-development
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wei Dai)
Thu Dec 21 19:21:38 1995
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995 15:10:42 -0800 (PST)
From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
To: "Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>
Cc: Cypherpunks <cypherpunks@toad.com>
In-Reply-To: <acfe321c01021004d5c5@[205.199.118.202]>
tcmay@got.net wrote:
> Not in cracking "truly large" problems by brute force. Even if each of the
> million processors is capable of 100 MIPS (which is unlikely, given the PIM
> approach and the fine-granularity, few-bit-or-less word size, etc.), this
> is only 10^8 MIPS. For problems that (for instance) 10^75 machines would
> have to spend 10^10 years on, not even a drop in an ocean.
The problem is there are still people and organizations that use 512-bit
RSA keys. The DOE recentedly awarded Intel a contract to build a
computer with 9072 Pentium Pro processors. I doubt that it will be used
for factoring keys, but if it were, it will be able to factor a 512-bit
number in a matter of months.
The boundary delimiting "truly large" problems and merely extremely
expensive ones inches up all the time. Less than a decade ago people
thought factoring RSA-129 was a "truly large" problem.
Wei Dai
