HACKERS SMASH U.S. GOVERNMENT ENCRYPTION

[Dave Emery]

Bill Stewart wrote :

> On the other hand, DES really is _much_ weaker than the DESCHALL
> project indicates - Intel CPUs aren't at all tuned for DES cracking,
> whereas a custom DES-cracker with similar horsepower could have
> done the job a lot faster.  If I remember right, Wiener's design
> used 64,000 chips, about as many as there were PCs working DESCHALL,
> for a crack that would take hours instead of months.

	The way I like to look at it, it should be easy these days to do
a  compiled custom chip deeply pipelined enough to try one key per
clock.  And ASICs running at 200 mhz aren't that uncommon these days.  
That is one key every 5 nanoseconds, or .2 billion keys a second, thus
only aout 40  of these chips ( a medium size board's worth which could
sit in a single  PC slot) could equal the maximum rate the huge
distributed cracked attained as documented in  Sameer's press release.


							Dave Emery
							die at die.com