At 09:37 PM 1/28/97 -0800, stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:
Any bets on whether the $5000 RC5-12/32/6 contest will be solved before the www.rsa.com contest status web page is updated? :-)
Or how long before someone in the government starts talking about how 56 bits takes 65,000 times as long to solve as 40 bits, which is 26 years for a whole building full of computers, and even 48 bits ought to take a month and a half for a whole building full of computers (or supercomputers, if they hype it up....)?
This, as I pointed out long ago, is why I didn't think a "crack the DES key" contest is necessarily a good idea, at least if it's ordinary Von-Neumann-type computers doing the searching. It makes DES look artificially good. Assuming it's possible to build a chip which tests solutions in a massively-pipelined mode, the 400,000 or so solutions per second tried (for what is probably a $2000 machine) would probably increase to 100 million per second per chip (at a cost of maybe $100 per chip, if implemented in parallel). That's 5000 times more economical, which would translate to a find in 2-3 days if the same dollars in hardware were invested. _THAT_ is the break we should hope the media publicizes, not the one that will eventually happen when accomplished by PCs or Suns, etc. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com