From: "Mark O. Aldrich" <maldrich@grci.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 10:50:17 +0800
To: Matt Blaze <mab@crypto.com>
Subject: Re: Distributed DES crack
In-Reply-To: <199607230422.AAA09435@crypto.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SCO.3.93.960723093328.11859A-100000@grctechs.va.grci.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Tue, 23 Jul 1996, Matt Blaze wrote:

<snip>
> 
> 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.
> alerts me to an interesting topic.  Thanks.)

Matt, can you give us an idea of the cost of a "modest size machine" might
be?  Is this something we can do with a C'punks bake sale or our we going
to need corporate/academic support?  Also, if we do use the bake sale
approach, is there some way the money can be collected and routed into an
R&D sort of facility without causing a lot of stink with whomever actually
runs the place, like a university?

------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
|Just as the strength of the Internet is  |Mark Aldrich                 |
|chaos, so the strength of our liberty    |GRCI INFOSEC Engineering     |
|depends upon the chaos and cacophony of  |maldrich@grci.com            |
|the unfettered speech the First Amendment|MAldrich@dockmaster.ncsc.mil |
|protects - District Judge Stewart Dalzell|                             |
|_______________________________________________________________________|
|The author is PGP Empowered.  Public key at:  finger maldrich@grci.com |
|    The opinions expressed herein are strictly those of the author     |
|         and my employer gets no credit for them whatsoever.           |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------