[2183] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: The secret message is...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Amanda Walker)
Wed Feb 25 17:14:47 1998
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 17:00:37 -0500 (EST)
From: Amanda Walker <amanda@intercon.com>
To: dee@cybercash.com, rsmith@securecomputing.com
Cc: cryptography@c2.net, markham@securecomputing.com,
ptrei@securitydynamics.com
> Why is that interesting? Macs are not particularly efficient for this. NSA
> has its own chip foundary and remember [...]
I find it interesting because it demonstrates that a private company
can buy existing off-the-shelf computing hardware and use freely
available software to build a 1-2 month DES key-cracker for only a few
millions of dollars, requiring no crypto-specific hardware or software
expertise.
Forget Macs. Buy a boatload of rackmount Pentium PCs, putting 16 or 24
in a chassis...
Brute force key search on DES is no longer the monopoly of governments
or even hackers. It's now simply a cash flow problem.
Amanda Walker
