At 2:33 PM -0400 2003/09/15, Paul Tenny wrote:
FPGA's however are not excessively hard to design nor are they enormously
expensive to fabricate. My memory is quite rusty on this but I seem to
recall a non-profit group wanted to attack the distributed.net problem
from a new angle. Rather than using a large number of commodity PC's,
they had something like 10-15 FPGA's (field programmable gate-array's,
task-specific processors that can be reprogrammed on the fly) with very
specific instruction sets on a special PCB that connected directly to a
normal PC (I don't recall how).
EFF's "Deep Crack" was based on FPGAs, and was used to
brute-force 56-bit DES encryption in less than 3 days. They used
similar hard to help the distributed.net effort. See
<http://www.eff.org/descracker/> for more info.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad(_dot_)knowles(_at_)skynet(_dot_)be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+
!w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++)
tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg