On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, at 05:06 PM, Faustine wrote:

On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, at 02:28 PM, Faustine wrote:

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Lots of interesting possibilities for cryptographic applications, I'm sure... Massively Parallel Computational Research Laboratory http://www.cs.sandia.gov/ Except when was the last time you heard of a Cypherpunks-interesting cipher being broken with _any_ amount of computer crunching?

Since when did people stop trying? The last time I heard a researcher talk about trying to break a Cypherpunks-interesting cipher was last Thursday. Hearsay and hot air? Probably; nothing that merits repeating. But it's hardly a dead issue.

And why not name who this researcher was, and why you think the cipher he was trying to break was Cypherpunks-interesting? (Mere factors of 100 are not interesting, vis-a-vis good ciphers and large keys. Arguably, as we have discussed many times, not even "swimming pools full of Adleman DNA computers" make a difference.)

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(The "challenges" broken by a couple of our own list members over the past several years were all weak ciphers by modern standards, or had key lengths way below even the recommended lengths of the day. Increasing the key lengths by just several bits ups the work factor by a factor of ten or so. Increasing it to recommended levels ups the work factor to the level of "not all the computers that will ever be built in all of the galaxies of the universe" will be able to brute-force a crack.)

We've all heard that line before, but I still don't think it's too far- fetched to assume that anyone who does work in this area might appreciate 50 megs of free software to create his own supercomputer.

Fatuous nonsense, Beowulf clusters have been out for several years. The hard part is getting 50 Pentiums, not the software. As for "50 gigaflops," big whoop. A readily-available dual G4 machine is rated at about 8-10 gigaflops. (Or "FLOPS," as you wish.) Still not interesting for cracking ciphers, in the real world.

You never know what might come from putting that kind of computational power in the hands of people here. Create, break, do whatever you want.

You need to get up to speed, so to speak. --Tim May