Specialized DES-cracker chips have of course been considered. Diffie and Hellman's nearly 20-year-old paper on cracking DES considered this. Wiener's calculation of a few years ago did more that this: he also architected a basic system. And the "how many bits is enough?" (sorry I don't have the official name on the tip of my tongue) panel considered such designs last year.

Yep, I'm familiar with the issue. Bottom line is, it'll take thousands of times the CPU power of the RC4-40 crack. Probably not 2^16 times more; I think RC4 has a longer initialization.

But actually building a DES cracker entails a level of commitment very difficult to achieve in an informal, volunteer effort. Not exactly something that 10 or 20 people can work on usefully. The advantage of the cracks done last year, the French and Australian cracks, and the MIT cracks, were that the "entry costs" for joining the project were low.

I'm not talking about one individual or organization building one big DES cracker. I'm thinking that DES chips _could_ be used to supliment the PCs in a distributed crack. People with PCs would feed keyspace through their PCs and people with DES chips could feed keyspace through their DES chips. DES chips just happen to have a _lot_ more cracking power than PCs, so they could make a big difference. Adding one DES chip would be like adding hundreds of PCs to the effort. PCs will probably still be the main factor simply because they're ubiquitous. Even with a bunch of DES chips and a massive legion of PCs, this is going to take a long time. Perhaps we should be looking at the thousands of computers and many months, more like the RSA-129 crack than the RC4-40 crack.

From "The Magic Words Are Squeamish Ossifrage": We believe that we could acquire 100 thousand machines without superhuman or unethical efforts.

If Lenstra et al know what they're talking about, then WE CAN DO THIS!!! ===================================================================== | Steve Reid - SysAdmin & Pres, EDM Web (http://www.edmweb.com/) | | Email: steve@edmweb.com Home Page: http://www.edmweb.com/steve/ | | PGP (2048/9F317269) Fingerprint: 11C89D1CD67287E68C09EC52443F8830 | | -- Disclaimer: JMHO, YMMV, TANSTAAFL, IANAL. -- | ===================================================================:)