[288] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: DES recovery project
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jim bell)
Sun Feb 23 15:34:51 1997
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 16:00:38 -0800
To: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security" <PADGETT@hobbes.orl.mmc.com>,
cryptography@c2.net
From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
At 12:14 AM 2/22/97 -0500, A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security wrote:
>>"After 2-3 months of searching, the whole internet was able to find one
>>single DES key."
>>Do you value this positively?
>
>IMNSHO, as soon as any code has been broken publicly, *no matter what the
>effort*, it will never again be fully trusted and corporate specificateions
>will be rewritten to raise the barrier.
However, what many of the public won't realize is that the threat posed by a
few thousand computers, linked by the Internet, against codes is tiny
compared to the alternative, dedicated key-crackers based on silicon.
What's that old ballpark estimate up to these days? With a key-per-cycle
chip, quantity 10000 , 200 MHz chips (at $10 each) would go through 2
trillion (2**41) keys per second, and would cover half of the keyspace of
DES in around 8000 seconds or a little over two hours.
I would find that far more of a threat than a few hundred hackers taking a
six months to do the same, all the while using $500,000 of electricity per
crack.
Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com
