SHA1 broken?

[Riad S. Wahby]

Tyler Durden <camera_lumina at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Well, maybe I misunderstand your statement here, but in Telecom most heavy 
> iron has plenty of FPGAs, and as far as I understand it, they more or less 
> have to.

Have to in what sense?  If they're constantly reconfiguring the FPGAs
(new software revs, or some sort of evolutionary "learning" process---
the latter not likely in telecom, of course), sure, they have  to be on
reprogrammable structures.

If, on the other hand, you're building a custom hash cracking machine,
you don't need to reconfigure your gates. You could design your
parallelized SHA1 cracking machine and dump it onto a bunch of FPGAs,
but if you really have unlimited resources you take the plunge into
ASICs, at which point you can tighten your timing substantially.

-- 
Riad S. Wahby
rsw at jfet.org