[642] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: 40 bit session cracking service?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Tue Apr 29 15:24:19 1997
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 12:12:32 -0700
To: Adam Shostack <adam@homeport.org>
From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net (Cryptography Mail list)
In-Reply-To: <199704281958.PAA20885@homeport.org>
At 03:58 PM 4/28/97 -0400, Adam Shostack wrote:
>Does anyone have a business model to sell me the cycles to crack 40
>bit SSL sessions? In other words, IF I could come up with say,
>$1,000, is there someone who I can cut a check to in exchange for
>craacking some number of SSL sessions?
You'll probably get some good input from Ian, Raph, and Dave,
and maybe from the Agorics folks.
It's probably a lot harder to build a business model like that these days,
unlike 10-20 years ago when computers were expensive enough to run
time-sharing businesses; CompuServe and UUnet have mutated into communications
businesses rather than CPU-cycle businesses. Part of the problem is
that CPU cycles are nearly free - you can buy a Pentium Pro 200 for $2-5000,
which is about as fast as a Cray 1 was, and 500 MHz Alphas and PowerPCs
will be in that price range in a year or so. Applications that need more
horsepower than that tend to be specialized -- either they need lots of
memory bandwidth, like traditional Cray number-crunching applications,
or they need lots of disk throughput (which is harder to farm out) --
and they tend to be run by businesses that are doing things on an
ongoing basis, e.g. weather forecasting, chip simulation, or financial models.
They also tend to be highly proprietary (except perhaps the weather)
and therefore not easy to farm out. Crypto doesn't need huge memory,
but the main people doing a large volume of it are the NSA (:-)
On the other hand, within a given business, or especially at universities,
where there's a reasonably large amount of idle PC/workstation time,
and an infinite demand for cheap CPU cycles for research projects,
it may make sense to use some sort of sharing network and agoric bidding
process to soak up spare cycles. But if you're trying to run a business,
the Attack of the Killer Micros will get you - your cutting-edge high-tech
machines today will be middle-of-the-road next year, trailing-edge
the following year, and fully depreciated after that. Tough to make
money that way.
# Thanks; Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
# (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)
