Jason Plonk writes:
There has been a lot of type of what kind of resources the US (in particluar the NSA) has in defeating various encryption schemes. I've read that they have 100+ Crays scattered throughout the country. My question is this, what kind of systems is the "other" side using? The US has export restrictions on super computers, such as the Cray. I know for a fact that the US .gov wouldn't allow the sale of a Cray to India, because .gov thought that it could be used in the manufacture of weapons.
The "other" side? I don't think the Cypherpunks have _any_ Crays all for themselves, though some Cypherpunks work in rooms full of Crays and at least several of them work with networks of many hundreds of workstations. Or by "other" side did you mean the Medellin Cartel and the importers for illegal and politically incorrect novels? Surely you didn't mean our new trading partners in Russia? On a more serious note, strong crypto will allow "foreigners" to send computing jobs to sites nearly anywhere in the world and have them run on compute servers. So much for export controls on the physical hardware! (And the "computing with encrypted instances" work of Joan Feigenbaum and others means in principle that the site doing the computing may not even be able to tell if they're computing bomb yields or crop watering schedules.) --Tim -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it.