At 01:28 PM 7/26/96 +0200, Remo Pini wrote:
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To: cypherpunks@toad.com Date: Fri Jul 26 13:25:22 1996
At 10:30 7/23/96, Matt Blaze wrote:
My estimate is that an FPGA-based machine that can do a single DES key every four months (eight months to exhaust the whole keyspace) could be built with off-the-shelf stuff for comfortably under $50k (plus labor, plus software development costs). A prototype board should cost under $1000 and will help prove the concept and get a more accurate cost estimate. I expect to build such a prototype machine myself, and, if it works as I expect, maybe the whole thing.
I am willing to financially contribute to the project.
If this were to be a card (via RS232 or PC-bus), thousands of people would be able to copy it, once the development process is finished. -> You'd have hardware that all those people could use for a distributed crack, the building cost would be distributed also (<$100), only development would have to be at one place (sponsored of course). Now, that would be a scary thought for DES-fans!
I've proposed that if it were done in this way, the circuit should be built external to a PC-clone or other computer, so that it can be easily tiled on a large pcb, in an "n by m" array. The reason is that if an individual cracker module were as simple and cheap as it should be, a person could easily want to run dozens if not hundreds of them. Communication would probably be done with a single serial data bus, with each module individually addressed. Due to the nature of the DES crack, communication would be rare, so it's likely that an ordinary '386 or '486-based computer could handle all the communication for a large number of such modules. I don't know if the figure of $10 thrown around for an FPGA is accurate, but if it is then a cost of $30 for each subsystem is probably doable, including pc board, assembly, and a few other components. A cost of $3000 for a 10-by-10 array seems reasonable to me, particularly since the throughput of each of those FPGA's ought to be at least 10x that of a general-purpose PC in this application. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com