[2196] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: The secret message is...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris Chiapusio)
Thu Feb 26 09:16:37 1998
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 06:12:56 -0500 (EST)
From: Chris Chiapusio <chipper@llamas.net>
To: Amanda Walker <amanda@intercon.com>
cc: dee@cybercash.com, rsmith@securecomputing.com, cryptography@c2.net,
markham@securecomputing.com, ptrei@securitydynamics.com
In-Reply-To: <199802252200.RAA03235@mail.intercon.com>
The discussion seems somewhat unknowing of the methods used to brute force
the DES key for this contest. Please visit http://www.distributed.net to
get an idea of how we accomplished this.
On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, 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
It is interesting because idle cycles were used on common hardware to
complete this project. The only software for this project, that wasn't a
background task, was the DOS client.
>
> Forget Macs. Buy a boatload of rackmount Pentium PCs, putting 16 or 24
> in a chassis...
>
Actually, the MAC code ended up being the most optimized of all the
platforms in the contest. Now this may have just been a side effect of
having better PPC asm coders, but I think there is more to it than that.
Chris Chiapusio
------
Please encrypt anything important.
PGP Key: http://pgp.ai.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x6CFA486D
