At 3:06 AM 7/23/96, Steve Reid wrote:

...

Any one up for a distributed brute force attack on single DES? My back-of-the-envelope calculations and guesstimates put this on the hairy edge of doability (the critical factor is how many machines can be recruited - a non-trivial cash prize would help).

Count me in. I've got a couple of net-connected Pentiums that are mostly idle.

Did you consider the possibility of DES chips in your back-of-the-envelope calculations? They are hundreds of times faster than PCs. I don't know where to get them or how much they cost, though. I would expect they wouldn't be too expensive. The cash might be better spent on DES chips than on a prize.

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. 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. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."