At 10:49 PM 1/7/97, pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz wrote:

Orbital mind control lasers made mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos) write:

...

...

1. I'm astonished at the low level of reaction RSA's announcement that they will be sponsoring a DES Challenge, with a $10,000 cash prize. I'm certainly jumping up and down and cheering. I said a while back that the

Peter Trei (trei@process.com) writes: life expectancy of DES would be about two weeks if anyone forked over serious cash.

I'm still a bit nervous about what the reaction will be though - won't the US government (and anyone else pushing DES) be able to say "It took 10,000 Pentiums several weeks, noone would bother doing that, so it's safe" (with a possible side order of "Safer-SK64 is 256 times as secure, anyone we really like can use that provided they hand over the keys in advance").

This was exactly my concern months ago. PC's are remarkably _inefficient_ systems for attempting to crack codes. I recall estimating, quite approximately, that it might take somewhere about $500,000 of electricity cost alone to check all 2**56 possible decrypts, most of which is going to power unnecessary components. (monitors, hard drives, sound cards, modem cards, etc, etc, etc.) By doing the decrypts on PCs (term used generically; it applies just as well to Mac's, PowerPC's, DEC Alpha's, etc) we make it look like DES is better than it really is. But I'm under no illusion. As the saying went, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat every problem as if it were a nail.) People have PC's, and will use them. Let me suggest, however, that somebody familiar with the details of DES and FPGA's (or other kinds of high-density programmable logic) figure out a ballpark estimate of how much it would cost to implement a minimalist DES-cracker in hardware. Don't do it, just estimate it. Then, when somebody has finally cracked that DES message and someone the news media is trying to suggest that this was an expensive effort, a more economical figure will be quotable. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com