At 11:11 AM 3/19/2005, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
---useful if you can't afford an ASIC run (a million bucks a mask...)
...
For someone making 10,000 routers, you use FPGAs.
DESCrack was solving a problem for which the x86 is not very efficient at computing --all the sub-byte bit-diddling-- and hardware is very efficient (by design in DES, after all).
EFF's DESCrack cost $200K in 1998 and used ASICs. (It's really only six years since we killed off single-DES!) There were 1500 DES-cracker ASIC chips in it. ASICs may cost a bit more today - Moore's Law helps, but it also means that chip designs can become larger and more complex, though code-cracker applications have a lot of uniformity in their design, and we've got six more years of experience building ASIC cell libraries that can be reused. I suspect a similar-sized machine would cost a similar amount but have a lot more DES functional units in it. FPGAs probably make more sense for routers, because you want the ability to change the firmware more often, and a router has a bunch of other parts as well, and realistically, cypher-cracking is not an economically viable activity for most people, so the cost-benefit tradeoffs are a bit twisted.