From: Jay Adams <jka@ece.cmu.edu>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 93 08:48:07 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: fast des
In-Reply-To: <19930616211451.5.TK@ROCKY.AI.MIT.EDU>
Message-ID: <9306171547.AA02951@mustang.ece.cmu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>    I don't know of any 2.4 gbps DES chips, but DEC has built a 1 gbps
>    chip.
>   ....  Key-loading is a different operation,
>    and that might not go nearly as fast.  Any hardware assists (i.e., DMA)
>    would be for the data, not for the next key to use on the same block of
>    data.
>
> Usually the limiting factor is examining the <ostensibly> decrypted data
> for statistically significant patterns indicating that you have the
> correct key.  The fast DES chips don't help with this at all.  A known
> plaintext attack, of course, doesn't have this problem, but these are
> probably of limited interest in real applications.

If you were interested in cracking DES, I wonder if you couldn't just
build the hardware out of FPGAs.  That way, you could make key loading
and the decrypted data test fast as well.

- Jay