From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 14:36:34 +0800
To: Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Mathematics > NSA + GCHQ
In-Reply-To: <97Aug23.121248edt.32258@brickwall.ceddec.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970827191352.02f513ec@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 10:07 AM 8/23/97 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:
>Now imagine if the prize was $1,000,000 or $10M. That's real money to just
>about every student out there. Every box at every university would be
>working on it. Employees would install the cracker first and ask their
>sysadmin later. If at all.

Heh.  Every box would be running more than one copy, unless you
hacked the code to have some sort of lockfile that would let it
take turns occasionally.  (If you just lock the user out,
they'll take the trouble to go "fix" the code....)

Fortunately, crunchons are getting pretty cheap these days,
though the challenge would still lead to government people saying
"See, it took a million dollars and every university computer in the country
and they still haven't cracked Skipjack" or whatever the target is,
just as they've kept the "$10,000 and a supercomputer" figurefor RC4/40
going around.

#			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 or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)