At 02:11 PM 7/22/96 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:
At 4:50 7/23/96, Paul Foley wrote:
"Peter Trei" <trei@process.com> wrote:
Any one up for a distributed brute force attack on single DES? My back-of-the-envelope calculations and guesstimates put this on the hairy edge of doability (the critical factor is how many machines can be recruited - a non-trivial cash prize would help).
Not quite sure what you mean by "doability" -- it's obviously doable, it just depends how long you want to wait.
I'm in.
Same here. I think it is about time for another full scale hack. Breaking DES would help get our message more than breaking 40bit RC-4 ever did.
So how many keys can (for example) a 100 MHz Pentium try per second? I assume it's known-plaintext. Even at a million per second, that's still somewhere around 35 billion machine-seconds (average) to find the solution. 1000 systems operating, and it's around a year to a solution. Doable, but not all that practical. What about the possibility of using DSP's? Is there any brand of 28.8 K modem which uses a "standard" DSP and EPROM firmware? Such a beast might be the easiest way to get a large amount of CPU horsepower operating independently of the host computer. DSP's are optimized to execute a large number of instructions with little I/O needs. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com