My take on breaking DES would be to just try all 2**56th keys on a massively parallel machine, though there may be better approaches. Keith

This isn't breaking DES. The best any encryption scheme can hope for is to only be broken by exhaustive search.

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My take on breaking DES would be to just try all 2**56th keys on a massively parallel machine, though there may be better approaches.

A massively parallel colection of dedicated DES encryption hardware might be more cost effective if had alot of these things to crack.

Speaking of which, does anyone know who makes "the DES chip" (is there more than one?)? I'd like to find a data sheet for it.

brad

Many manufacturers make DES chips. One that comes to mind is American Micro Devices, though I don't remember a part number off hand. I can find out and post it to the list. I do remember reading the data sheet, and it looked like a nice implementation. If I'm not mistaken, Motorola makes one as well, though it may have been obsoleted by improvements in speed.