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

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.

(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.

There are indeed some cryptographic uses for big computers, but not much of real interest here. Some voice- and traffic-analysis stuff, but not cracking modern ciphers.

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. ~Faustine.