From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 14:39:34 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Borders *are* transparent
Message-ID: <199607230349.UAA03865@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 02:11 PM 7/22/96 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:
>At 4:50 7/23/96, Paul Foley wrote:
>>"Peter Trei" <trei@process.com> wrote:
>>
>>   Any one up for a distributed brute force attack on single DES? My
>>   back-of-the-envelope calculations and guesstimates put this on the
>>   hairy edge of doability (the critical factor is how many machines can
>>   be recruited - a non-trivial cash prize would help).
>>
>>Not quite sure what you mean by "doability" -- it's obviously doable,
>>it just depends how long you want to wait.
>>
>>I'm in.
>
>Same here. I think it is about time for another full scale hack. Breaking
>DES would help get our message more than breaking 40bit RC-4 ever did.

So how many keys can (for example) a 100 MHz Pentium try per second?  I 
assume it's known-plaintext.  Even at a million per second, that's still 
somewhere around 35 billion machine-seconds (average) to find the solution.  
1000 systems operating, and it's around a year to a solution.  Doable, but 
not all that practical.


What about the possibility of using DSP's?  Is there any brand of 28.8 K 
modem which uses a "standard" DSP and EPROM firmware?  Such a beast might be 
the easiest way to get a large amount of CPU horsepower operating 
independently of the host computer.  DSP's are optimized to execute a large 
number of instructions with little I/O needs.


Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com