From: Matt Blaze <mab@crypto.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 93 03:25:59 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: network parallel decryption amateur style
In-Reply-To: <9308190414.AA00586@alumni.cco.caltech.edu>
Message-ID: <9308191010.AA10142@crypto.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>Recent postings have gotten me to thinking:  If we wrote a
>easily portable UNIX program to decrypt DES in parallel across
>our many machines, how fast could we go?
>

Using the fastest software DES implementation I know of, optimized for
fast single-bit key change, it would take about a million SparcStation-years
(at 100% utilization) to do an exhaustive DES search.

Even assuming a order of magnitude faster than that (from a better
implementation or faster common workstation hardware), that's still
an awful lot of Sparc-years you'd have to get "the net" to donate.

-matt