Tim May[SMTP:tcmay@got.net] wrote:

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

...

Lots of interesting possibilities for cryptographic applications, I'm sure... 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?

(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. [...] 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. --Tim May

I'll second this - the early 40 bit SSL cracks, and the RSA Symmetric challenges, operated to force acknowledgement that 40 and 56 bit keylengths were simply inadequate. I was particularly steamed by some Clinton appointee claiming with a straight face that a DES cracker could not be built because "it would melt down". The success of the challenges created 'facts on the ground' which could not be hand-waved away by government officials, and meant that customers started to insist on something better. BTW, the distributed.net folks are still cranking at 64 bit RC5. They have now searched 54% of the keyspace in 1,386 days. One thing I'd like to see done with these huge distributed computers is to factor moduli, such as those in the RSA Factoring Challenges (the prizes are substantial), A major bottleneck at this point is the matrix reduction step. If a method could be found to run this in parallel, then distributed factoring would be greatly eased. Peter Trei