Re: fast des

The DEC gigabit/second DES chip was based on the FURY VSC15K gate array from Vitesse. It's a gallium arsenide device. The full paper is ``A High-speed DES Implementation for Network Applications'', by Hans Eberle, SRC Research Report 90, DEC Systems Research Center. Abstracts are (apparently) online in pub/DEC/srcabstracts.list, on gatekeeper.pa.dec.com. You can get hard-copy by sending email to src-report@src.dec.com. Oh yeah -- he gives the search time as 16 days, for about $1M in DES chips alone, without any support circuitry. The chips are estimated to cost $300 apiece. His chip is well-suited for DES-cracking because it has a separate key-loading port, so you can change the key each cycle without slowing down the pipeline.