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1996-07-24 - Re: Distributed DES crack

Header Data

From: Matt Blaze <mab@crypto.com>
To: “Mark O. Aldrich” <maldrich@grci.com>
Message Hash: b0bdaf662b4690152192bd481b87e3951fb71f70f1aa9e8517a501fa3c4fb20a
Message ID: <199607231430.KAA14775@crypto.com>
Reply To: <Pine.SCO.3.93.960723093328.11859A-100000@grctechs.va.grci.com>
UTC Datetime: 1996-07-24 01:41:05 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 09:41:05 +0800

Raw message

From: Matt Blaze <mab@crypto.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 09:41:05 +0800
To: "Mark O. Aldrich" <maldrich@grci.com>
Subject: Re: Distributed DES crack
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SCO.3.93.960723093328.11859A-100000@grctechs.va.grci.com>
Message-ID: <199607231430.KAA14775@crypto.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> On Tue, 23 Jul 1996, Matt Blaze wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> > 
> > Personally, I'd rather someone finish up the Wiener ASIC to the point where
> > it could go out to fab, get some prototype chips made, design a board around
> > it, and publish the design, from board layout on down.  This would be a
> > great Master's project, and some of us (maybe me, but I'll have to check)
> > might even be able to scrape up enough funds to buy enough chips/boards/etc
> > to build a modest size machine (say, that could exhaust a DES key in 1-6
> > months).  Initial engineering costs aside, the marginal cost of each
> > such machine could be well within the budgets of, say, a medium size crypto
> > research lab, and would make a scary enough demo to convince even the
> > most trusting management types of the risks of 56 bit keys.
> > alerts me to an interesting topic.  Thanks.)
> 
> Matt, can you give us an idea of the cost of a "modest size machine" might
> be?  Is this something we can do with a C'punks bake sale or our we going
> to need corporate/academic support?  Also, if we do use the bake sale
> approach, is there some way the money can be collected and routed into an
> R&D sort of facility without causing a lot of stink with whomever actually
> runs the place, like a university?

My estimate is that an FPGA-based machine that can do a single DES key
every four months (eight months to exhaust the whole keyspace) could
be built with off-the-shelf stuff for comfortably under $50k (plus
labor, plus software development costs).  A prototype board should cost
under $1000 and will help prove the concept and get a more accurate cost
estimate.  I expect to build such a prototype machine myself, and, if it
works as I expect, maybe the whole thing.

-matt

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