At 12:13 AM 4/9/96 -0700, Steve Reid wrote: a board-mounted AT&T Orca chip available for around $400. They said it could crack a 40-bit key in 5 hours (average)... ... Has anyone out there seen one of these?
"Dave Emery" <die@pig.die.com> pessimised:
[... the tools are too expensive...] [... and the skills required are too high...] [... for anyone on cypherpunks...]
Come on, Dave, this isn't alt.2600! Most of the subscribers to this list are professionals -- engineers, programmers, mathematicians, lawyers -- not phone phreaks. I'm sure that there are more than a few of us with the knowledge, experience, and free access to the resources needed to handle most relatively small-scale designs like this. (It's like saying that no one on cypherpunks has access to the distributed computing resources necessary to perform other sorts of brute-force cracking -- which is patently ludicrous.) For instance, from where I'm sitting in my *home* office, I can see the full development packages for Xilinx and AT&T FPGAs, Viewlogic VHDL, schematic, and simulation tools, an HP 1660A logic analyser, and a Tek THS 720 500 MHz digital scope. And I doubt if I'm the only one here who does this for a living. The problem isn't resources, but time and motivation -- what sort of situation would it take to get me (for instance), and one of cypherpunk's cryptography wizards, to take the time to collaborate on something like this. (BTW, if you're willing to break the design into a couple of FPGAs, like the Motorola MPA 1000 devices, you can find all the software you need for free...) -- Roger Williams PGP key available from PGP public keyservers Coelacanth Engineering consulting & turnkey product development Middleborough, MA wireless * DSP-based instrumentation * ATE tel +1 508 947-8049 * fax +1 508 947-9118 * http://www.coelacanth.com/