From: jamesd@echeque.com
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996 00:28:48 +0800
To: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security" <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Numbers don't lie...
Message-ID: <199602271527.HAA15152@dns1.noc.best.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 11:18 AM 2/18/96 -0500, A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security wrote:
>The second point is that their scalability seems to be based on costs per
>chip alone, cost for which the engineering cost has been recovered and for
>which the yeild is significant, hardly givens when you are talking pushing
>the state of the art, given this 200 Mhz Pentiums would be U$10.00 also
>(well, maybe U$25.00).


Doubtless that is why they assume chips that are very far from state of the art:

Since interprocess communication is trivial for key cracking, 
you are better off using large numbers of cheap chips, than 
smaller numbers of good chips.

>Finally, no cost is allocated to the sustem required to program/evaluate
>the ponderings of these 100's of ASICs. As anyone who has ever programmed
>a massively parallel computer (which is what they are talking about in their
>brute force machine, it is the boundary communications that kill you.

Again:  Interprocess communication is trivial.  A brute force key cracking
machine is *not* a general purpose massively parallel computer.

Suppose you have a million chips.  Each chip tries keys.  A few bytes 
of the plaintext, headers and stuff are known.  Assume eight bytes known.  
Then we could handle the interprocess communication with a single desktop 
computer.

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