[forwarded for your enjoyment --eric] A NEW WORLD RECORD IN PASSWORD CHECKING HAS BEEN SET: ----------------------------------------------------- Roch Bourbonnais, a Thinking Machines Corporation engineer, has ported and optimized the CM/2 port of the UFC-crypt to a CM/5 system. The UFC-crypt (Ultra Fast Crypt) implementation on the CM/2 Connection Machine (parallel computer) is a UNIX password checking routine (crypt()) ported by Michael Glad at UNI-C. The port, that is written in CM-fortran, utilizes the CM/5 vector units and is partly programmed in cdpeac (vector unit assembly language). The package achieves 1560 encryptions/second/vector unit. This scales to 6,4 million encryptions per second on a large 1024 node machine. 800,000 - - - - - small 128 - - With this impressive performance, all combinations of 6 letters can be tried in less than an hour and all combinations of 6 lower-case letters can be tried in less than one minute. Congratulations, Jorgen Bo Madsen +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ ! Jorgen Bo Madsen, Security Consultant ! ! UNI-C Lyngby, Danish Computing Centre for Research and Education ! ! DTH, Building 305, DK - 2800 Lyngby, ! ! Phone : +45-45-938355 ! ! Telefax: +45-45-930220 ! ! E-Mail : Jorgen.Bo.Madsen@uni-c.dk ! +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ ------- End of forwarded message -------