[1025] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Cracking a DES Message
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Thu Jun 19 20:58:57 1997
To: cryptography@c2.net
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 19 Jun 1997 16:28:37 MDT."
<v03007811afcf5dd411fc@[172.17.1.61]>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 20:53:55 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Rick Smith writes:
> 1) What entries does this put in the Guiness' Book of World Records?
>
> Obviously, the "largest crypto key broken by brute force search"
>
> Peter Trei suggested "largest calculation ever performed" which sounds like
> a fair claim.
I suspect it isn't. A massively parallel computer at Columbia ran for
a couple of years trying to computationally verify a theoretical
prediction about the rest mass of the proton. I *believe* the computation
was actually substantially nastier than the DES crack. I'd have to
check, though.
Anyway, back to cryptography.
Perry
