At 11:52 PM 8/21/95, Timothy C. May wrote:

Call it a factor of "only" 6000 times harder than the SSL challenge. Hard to imagine this happening in the next two years.

Maybe if much of the Net community was energized to run DES crackers instead of Flying Toasters, but a hard effort to organize...for fleeting reward.

Given the rate at which news of the prior cracks seems to have spread among people quite new to these questions, I think you'd be surprised: I've heard mention of it from no less than ten people who, to my knowledge, had never before taken any interest whatsoever in crypto questions. Granted, ten people a-laboring away on Pentiums and PPCs ain't much--but, who knows?, my experience might just scale quite well. Yes, I know: Life is short and art is long. Still, I think it's worth a try: failure seems likely and success remote, but how much sweeter victory if the project were to succeed. The key, I think, would lie in making participation in the project extremely accessible: developing simple platform-specific apps that'd make sweeping space nearly idiot-proof. If joe.anne.net could DL an app appropriate to hir platform then fill out field in a web page that would delegate keyspace according to the question "I can let my [platform] run for [n] hours," and easily report back the results, the response might be quite strong. How long it would take to succeed, _if_ it did, is anyone's guess: it could be a day or a decade. Obviously, the preparation would be a labor-intensive; the trade-off, a good one imho, is that this labor having been performed, the reservoir of potential contributors would expand manifold. If we could increase the reservoir by a factor of 1000, which isn't at all unlikely, that advance would be nothing to sneeze at. Cracking something that for now seems beyond reach would up the ante in a pretty big way, and would put that much more pressure on policymakers to jack that bit-limit up. And that's exactly what we want. Ted