But let's give the NSA/SRC some credit. These new SIMD processors are
On Aug 18, 4:41pm, Peter Wayner wrote: probably
smarter. Let's say that they're 64 bit wide RISC machines which can only access their own local on chip memory. If they can run 2 times faster (100 MHz) and do DES encryption in 1000 cycles, then this means that the brute force attack on DES could be done in 4 days. Bam.
Actually, I would be surprised if the "SIMD" processors were not a huge array of reprogrammable FPGA's, quite possibly Xilinx's. The possibilities of a large array of these chips, each with local memory, is quite interesting. I have personally seen an array of 64 Xilinx chips in a DEC PeRL box doing RSA, at speeds similar or better to almost all available custom hardware implementations of the cipher. BTW, with a purchase of half a million chips, economies of scale would get the devices well within budget. Ian.