[2982] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Turing Bombe story
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marcus Leech)
Thu Jul 16 23:00:15 1998
Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 20:20:14 +0200
From: "Marcus Leech" <Marcus.Leech.mleech@nt.com>
To: Carl Ellison <cme@acm.org>
CC: "Scott G. Kelly" <skelly@redcreek.com>,
Steve Reid <sreid@alpha.sea-to-sky.net>,
"Marcus Leech" <Marcus.Leech.mleech@nt.com>, cryptography@c2.net
Carl Ellison wrote:
> I should write up my modern Bombe design. There may be a cipher out there
> that could be vulnerable to such an attack -- not to mention Enigma itself.
> It might be fun just to show out how fast we could make a Bombe in today's
> technology with no moving parts and modern gate switching times.
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if we could test 10^8 keys a second, which would give
> a total exhaustive search time of about 10 msec. or 5 msec. average time
> to a drop.
>
Yes, Carl, do it.
What I'd like to see is it translated into something you could
code in C, without Prolog intervening. Given the relatively
simple electro-mechanical nature of the Bombe, you'd expect
to be able to translate it into software relatively easily.
You mentioned a ballpark of about 10^6 high-level operations
required; even if that breaks down into (let's say) 10^3
micro-operations, that's still doable in software, with
an impressive break time.
I'm glad my little post stimulated an intellectually interesting
topic :-)
