From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1997 20:43:26 -0800 (PST)
To: caronni@tik.ee.ethz.ch>
Subject: Re: RC5-12/32/5 contest solved
Message-ID: <199701300442.UAA01150@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 09:37 PM 1/28/97 -0800, stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:
>Any bets on whether the $5000 RC5-12/32/6 contest will be solved 
>before the www.rsa.com contest status web page is updated?  :-)
>
>Or how long before someone in the government starts talking about
>how 56 bits takes 65,000 times as long to solve as 40 bits, 
>which is 26 years for a whole building full of computers,
>and even 48 bits ought to take a month and a half for a whole
>building full of computers (or supercomputers, if they hype it up....)?


This, as I pointed out long ago, is why I didn't think a "crack the DES key" 
contest is necessarily a good idea, at least if it's ordinary 
Von-Neumann-type computers doing the searching.  It makes DES look 
artificially good.

Assuming it's possible to build a chip which tests solutions in a 
massively-pipelined mode, the 400,000 or so solutions per second tried (for 
what is probably a $2000 machine) would probably increase to 100 million per 
second per chip (at a cost of maybe $100 per chip, if implemented in 
parallel).    That's 5000 times more economical,  which would translate to a 
find in 2-3 days if the same dollars in hardware were invested.

_THAT_ is the break we should hope the media publicizes, not the one that 
will eventually happen when accomplished by PCs or Suns, etc.



Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com