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