From: stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 22:10:55 -0800 (PST)
To: Ian Goldberg <iang@cs.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: Last nail for US crypto export policy?
Message-ID: <199701290610.WAA20623@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Yee-hah!  Congratulations (and enjoy the $1000 check!)
So what did you do interesting cryptographically in the crack, 
other than coordinating a bunch of workstations?
Was it just brute force with well-tuned code?
Given the figures in your press release, it sounds like you
tested about 350 billion keys out of a trillion possible,
so you hit the winner a shade early.  That's about 400,000 keys/sec/box.
Are the machines mostly Pentiums, Alphas, Suns, etc.?

At 03:59 PM 1/28/97 -0800, Ian Goldberg <iang@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>EXPORTABLE CRYPTOGRAPHY TOTALLY INSECURE: CHALLENGE CIPHER BROKEN IMMEDIATELY
>
>January 28, 1997 - Ian Goldberg, a UC Berkeley graduate student, 
>announced today that he had successfully cracked RSA Data Security 
>Inc.'s 40-bit challenge cipher in just under 3.5 hours.
....
>Goldberg used UC Berkeley's Network of Workstations (known as the NOW) 
>to harness the computational resources of about 250 idle machines.  
>This allowed him to test 100 billion possible "keys" per hour -- 

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#     (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)