[2186] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: The secret message is...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marcus Leech)
Wed Feb 25 19:52:14 1998
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 17:52:12 +0100
From: "Marcus Leech" <Marcus.Leech.mleech@nt.com>
To: Amanda Walker <amanda@intercon.com>
CC: cryptography@c2.net
Amanda Walker wrote:
>
> > 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
Our internal network has O(10**5) addressable objects on it, many of which
are computing systems. If I had such a problem to solve, I'd simply
arrange for the correct software to get installed, over time, on all
of these systems, and let them soak up idle time computing "interesting"
problems. That doesn't require that I go out and buy any dedicated hardware.
Most computing nodes on our network are desktop machines that are idle
67% of the time...
