Brute-forcing DES

[Timothy C. May]

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.
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