From: Roger Williams <roger@coelacanth.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 22:57:33 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Bank transactions on Internet
In-Reply-To: <9604100239.AA12152@pig.die.com>
Message-ID: <9604102227.AA0401@sturgeon.coelacanth.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


  >>  At 12:13 AM 4/9/96 -0700, Steve Reid wrote:
  >> a board-mounted AT&T Orca chip available for around $400. They
  >> said it could crack a 40-bit key in 5 hours (average)...
  >> ... Has anyone out there seen one of these?

>>>>> "Dave Emery" <die@pig.die.com> pessimised:

  > [... the tools are too expensive...]
  > [... and the skills required are too high...]
  > [... for anyone on cypherpunks...]

Come on, Dave, this isn't alt.2600!  

Most of the subscribers to this list are professionals -- engineers,
programmers, mathematicians, lawyers -- not phone phreaks.  I'm sure
that there are more than a few of us with the knowledge, experience,
and free access to the resources needed to handle most relatively
small-scale designs like this.

(It's like saying that no one on cypherpunks has access to the
distributed computing resources necessary to perform other sorts of
brute-force cracking -- which is patently ludicrous.)

For instance, from where I'm sitting in my *home* office, I can see
the full development packages for Xilinx and AT&T FPGAs, Viewlogic
VHDL, schematic, and simulation tools, an HP 1660A logic analyser, and
a Tek THS 720 500 MHz digital scope.

And I doubt if I'm the only one here who does this for a living.

The problem isn't resources, but time and motivation -- what sort of
situation would it take to get me (for instance), and one of
cypherpunk's cryptography wizards, to take the time to collaborate on
something like this.

(BTW, if you're willing to break the design into a couple of FPGAs,
like the Motorola MPA 1000 devices, you can find all the software you
need for free...)

-- 
Roger Williams            PGP key available from PGP public keyservers
Coelacanth Engineering        consulting & turnkey product development
Middleborough, MA           wireless * DSP-based instrumentation * ATE
tel +1 508 947-8049 * fax +1 508 947-9118 * http://www.coelacanth.com/