At 10:32 AM 5/9/97 -0700, Bill Stout wrote:
During a Digital seminar, a statement was made that 64-bit CPUs are about 10x faster than a 32-bit CPU in dealing with crypto, and that Alphas are favorites of Crypto-affiliated Gov't agencies.
They're certainly nice boxes :-) But are they really more cost-effective than piles of cheaper Pentium-Pro-200 boxes? Crypto mainly falls into three kinds of calculations - bignum modular exp/mult/factor - Alphas are great at this - bit-twiddling for DES and friends - don't know if Alphas like this or not, but doing multiple operations per very fast clock cycle won't hurt - byte- and word-oriented cryto, like RC4 and IDEA - 64-bit words may be no better than 32-bit for this, unless you can find ways to transform the problem and use it for parallelism.
I spoke with a reference within Digital and the following logic was presented: o A 128-bit key is processed in two 64-bit chunks, vs four 32-bit chunks, greatly reducing processing time. o The Alpha executes four instructions per clock cycle. o Alpha clock ratings are 600MHz this summer. o Caveat: The O.S. needs to support 64-bit processing (Digital UNIX or Linux, not NT).
The _compiler_ needs to support 64-bit processing, but you're not likely to need 64-bit address spaces or care too much how fast you can haul data from files into cache, since you're mostly going to be bashing bignums in cache anyway. If NT will let you run object code with 64-bit longs, you're ok.
I'm concerned about the strength of personal/corporate crypto in face of large jumps in processing power.
Important topic, but Moore's Law will be with us for a couple more years, so a factor of 10 in processing power is just 3-4 years speed increase. That means you need about 3 bits more key for your symmetric cypher or 30 bits more for RSA or Diffie-Hellman public keys. It's another nail in RC4/40 and DES's coffins, and another motivation not to use 512-bit RSA, but no problem for IDEA or RC4/128 or Triple-DES or 1024-bit RSA. A more serious effect of big fast chips is that they can drive better data collection machines - how much more pattern-searching and traffic analysis can altavista.nsa.mil and dejanews.nsa.mil do with a multi-processor Alpha that they couldn't with their old DEC-20s? # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)