At 11:18 AM 2/18/96 -0500, A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security wrote:

The second point is that their scalability seems to be based on costs per chip alone, cost for which the engineering cost has been recovered and for which the yeild is significant, hardly givens when you are talking pushing the state of the art, given this 200 Mhz Pentiums would be U$10.00 also (well, maybe U$25.00).

Doubtless that is why they assume chips that are very far from state of the art: Since interprocess communication is trivial for key cracking, you are better off using large numbers of cheap chips, than smaller numbers of good chips.

Finally, no cost is allocated to the sustem required to program/evaluate the ponderings of these 100's of ASICs. As anyone who has ever programmed a massively parallel computer (which is what they are talking about in their brute force machine, it is the boundary communications that kill you.

Again: Interprocess communication is trivial. A brute force key cracking machine is *not* a general purpose massively parallel computer. Suppose you have a million chips. Each chip tries keys. A few bytes of the plaintext, headers and stuff are known. Assume eight bytes known. Then we could handle the interprocess communication with a single desktop computer. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com