From: Adam Shostack <adam@lighthouse.homeport.org>
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 01:53:36 +0800
To: PADGETT@hobbes.orl.mmc.com (A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security)
Subject: Re: Numbers don't lie...
In-Reply-To: <960218111857.202256bd@hobbes.orl.mmc.com>
Message-ID: <199602181735.MAA10219@homeport.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


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).

	Government agencies don't need to recover costs, they stick it
to the taxpayer.  Why was Clipper so cheap before it bombed?

| 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.
|
| True, each machine could operate on a specific portion of the keyspace with
| bits fixed as a function of its address, but each will need to be loaded
| with the plaintext to match and have some means to communicate success.
| 

	You just need to flag riase, not do real communication.  You
could use a tree structure to pass data back.  No need for 11
dimensional hypercube interconnects.  (Side note: Thinking Machines is
out of Chapter 11.)

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume