From: "E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 23:25:46 +0800
To: mab@crypto.com
Subject: Re: Distributed DES crack
Message-ID: <01I7FZ3IBTAU9EDE4M@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


From:	IN%"mab@crypto.com"  "Matt Blaze" 23-JUL-1996 09:38:21.11

>Personally, I'd rather someone finish up the Wiener ASIC to the point where
>it could go out to fab, get some prototype chips made, design a board around
>it, and publish the design, from board layout on down.  This would be a
>great Master's project, and some of us (maybe me, but I'll have to check)
>might even be able to scrape up enough funds to buy enough chips/boards/etc
>to build a modest size machine (say, that could exhaust a DES key in 1-6
>months).  Initial engineering costs aside, the marginal cost of each
>such machine could be well within the budgets of, say, a medium size crypto
>research lab, and would make a scary enough demo to convince even the
>most trusting management types of the risks of 56 bit keys.

	How about generalized FPGA boards? Some applications in computational
biology (searching for similar genes or proteins using FASTA, etcetera) use
those quite a bit - and they're available for only about 20,000 or so for quite
a few high-level FPGA chips on a board. We've been looking into getting one
such and renting its use out on the Web, but the initial investment costs are
beyond what available grants will cover; maybe later. Given that at Rutgers is
one of the people doing whole bunches of stuff on Web security - namely Simon
Cooper - it should't be too difficult. But that will be at least a year or so.
	-Allen

> - matt
>(Please cc me on replies, as I'm not reading the list except when someone
>alerts me to an interesting topic.  Thanks.)