On Thu, 20 Jun 1996, jim bell wrote:

At 09:20 PM 6/20/96 -0400, Michael Froomkin wrote:

...

I have seen the text of the speech. The wire service accounts wildly, wildly exaggerate. This is a non-story...except for AG Reno's assertion that it would take the government a year to break one DES message with a "supercomputer". She presumably believes this. We know the number for known plaintext attacks, but assuming you don't have a known plaintext, what's a more reasonable assumption?

If done in parallel, on a dedicated, 200 MHz custom chip, my WAG says that such a chip could try, and statistically analyze the results of 10 million DES codes per second. (it would do the decrypts on a number of parallel DES blocks, and look for typical ASCII code pattern probabilities, again all in parallel.) A typical cracking system might have 100 boards of 100 such chips, or perhaps a 100 billion such decrypts per second. Checking the keyspace would require 2**19 seconds, or about a half million seconds, or 6 days. Average decrypt, of course, in 3 days.

For a guy that used to be in my killfile, I agree with Jim on this one. William Knowles erehwon@c2.org Finger for public key --