On Dec 12, 7:31pm, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
...its a question of deriding the security of any system that takes so little time to crack, and thats assuming there are no better attacks than brute force (yet to be determined). With optimization, you can do even better than that. With a little bit of hardware (not very much) you can crack open a 40 bit keyspace with the effort normally reserved for opening your bathroom door in the morning.
Actually, it's a bit more than a "little bit of hardware". One of the interesting realisations of pondering VLSI crackers was how much chip real-estate storing 2048 bits of laregly static internal state required, disregarding the size of a 2048 bit bus (remember "transistors are cheap, wires are expensive".) All transfers would have to be multi-cycle operations, which adds complexity due to the need to time and synchronise these transfers. It's by no means impossible, but the design of such a device is certainly not a trivial exercise in engineering, and I would never call the result a "little piece of hardware". Ian.