On Tue, 23 Jul 1996, Matt Blaze wrote:
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Personally, I'd rather someone finish up the Wiener ASIC to the point where it could go out to fab, get some prototype chips made, design a board around it, and publish the design, from board layout on down. This would be a great Master's project, and some of us (maybe me, but I'll have to check) might even be able to scrape up enough funds to buy enough chips/boards/etc to build a modest size machine (say, that could exhaust a DES key in 1-6 months). Initial engineering costs aside, the marginal cost of each such machine could be well within the budgets of, say, a medium size crypto research lab, and would make a scary enough demo to convince even the most trusting management types of the risks of 56 bit keys. alerts me to an interesting topic. Thanks.)
Matt, can you give us an idea of the cost of a "modest size machine" might be? Is this something we can do with a C'punks bake sale or our we going to need corporate/academic support? Also, if we do use the bake sale approach, is there some way the money can be collected and routed into an R&D sort of facility without causing a lot of stink with whomever actually runs the place, like a university?
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. -matt