Perhaps a Java page containing a DES cracker that one could run for the casual participant, and a set of links to download a real cracker for the non-casual participant... I think its really time that we did this. DES must be shown to be dead. When the media hear about it, they will, of course, get "experts" saying "but it took five thousand people millions of dollars in computer time". We should ask Matt Blaze to write a paper in advance explaining that although this test, on general hardware, took a lot of effort, that with specialized hardware it would be cheap as can be. Perry Paul Foley writes:
"Peter Trei" <trei@process.com> wrote:
Any one up for a distributed brute force attack on single DES? My back-of-the-envelope calculations and guesstimates put this on the hairy edge of doability (the critical factor is how many machines can be recruited - a non-trivial cash prize would help).
Not quite sure what you mean by "doability" -- it's obviously doable, it just depends how long you want to wait.
I'm in.