[2182] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: The secret message is...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rick Smith)
Wed Feb 25 17:09:41 1998
In-Reply-To: <199802252023.PAA24601@jekyll.piermont.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 15:32:37 -0600
To: perry@piermont.com
From: Rick Smith <rsmith@securecomputing.com>
Cc: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei@securitydynamics.com>, cryptography@c2.net,
markham@securecomputing.com
I wrote,
>> 68,859 (Macs for a month) * $52 (per month leasing)
>> = $3,580,668 to crack a single DES key
Perry noted:
>That is, of course, using rather overpowerful hardware for the job.
>
>If you used specialized equipment, the price would be orders of
>magnitude smaller -- literally.
Michael Wiener's 1994 design proposed cracking 1 DES key every 35 hours for
$100,000 per machine. This latest DES crack took about 20 times as long
with available commercial equipment that cost about 35 times as much. So
Wiener's theoretical machine would be about 700 times more efficient -- 2
to 3 orders of magnitude.
I didn't have numbers handy for the other platforms Peter Trei listed. It's
possible that the costs are smaller with different hardware. I wouldn't
expect that Mac clones would offer the most cracking horsepower for the
cost. I chose them because I had the price handy.
Rick.
rsmith@securecomputing.com
