19 Aug
1993
19 Aug
'93
10:25 a.m.
Recent postings have gotten me to thinking: If we wrote a easily portable UNIX program to decrypt DES in parallel across our many machines, how fast could we go?
Using the fastest software DES implementation I know of, optimized for fast single-bit key change, it would take about a million SparcStation-years (at 100% utilization) to do an exhaustive DES search. Even assuming a order of magnitude faster than that (from a better implementation or faster common workstation hardware), that's still an awful lot of Sparc-years you'd have to get "the net" to donate. -matt