Distributed DES crack

Mark O. Aldrich maldrich at grci.com
Tue Jul 23 19:50:17 PDT 1996


On Tue, 23 Jul 1996, Matt Blaze wrote:

<snip>
> 
> Personally, I'd rather someone finish up the Wiener ASIC to the point where
> it could go out to fab, get some prototype chips made, design a board around
> it, and publish the design, from board layout on down.  This would be a
> great Master's project, and some of us (maybe me, but I'll have to check)
> might even be able to scrape up enough funds to buy enough chips/boards/etc
> to build a modest size machine (say, that could exhaust a DES key in 1-6
> months).  Initial engineering costs aside, the marginal cost of each
> such machine could be well within the budgets of, say, a medium size crypto
> research lab, and would make a scary enough demo to convince even the
> most trusting management types of the risks of 56 bit keys.
> alerts me to an interesting topic.  Thanks.)

Matt, can you give us an idea of the cost of a "modest size machine" might
be?  Is this something we can do with a C'punks bake sale or our we going
to need corporate/academic support?  Also, if we do use the bake sale
approach, is there some way the money can be collected and routed into an
R&D sort of facility without causing a lot of stink with whomever actually
runs the place, like a university?

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