
Deep Crack - kirubakaran
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
======
tptacek
The closest thing there is to a debate in the industry about DES is whether
it's OK to keep using Triple DES --- which is irrelevant to you, because
you're just going to use AES in all your non-legacy non-Java non-mainframe-
integrated startup code.

DES has pretty much been eliminated from the mainstream, which is a rare win
for security.

~~~
furburger
i thought 3des was still used in ATMs? my (limited) understanding was that its
weakness was balanced by its otherwise maturity...and that a potential hacker
had very little time in which to make the crack and make use of it

------
quantumhobbit
This was ten years ago. I wonder how little a machine like that would cost
today. By Moore's Law, it would be on order of $8,000(a gross simplification,
and doing the math in my head but interesting nonetheless).

~~~
ivankirigin
I'm not sure that's correct. Are you scaling down the cost to build it or to
design it? Does the cost to design per transitor count decrease with Moore's
law?

With better software for verification that can scale in complexity as chips
get cheaper & more powerful, I wouldn't be surprised if design costs did
decrease with Moore's Law. But it might not be so straight forward.

------
iclelland
[http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Secrets-Encryption-
Research-P...](http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Secrets-Encryption-Research-
Politics/dp/1565925203)

Deep Crack was big news some ten years ago, but this is just a random link to
wikipedia, with no other commentary about why it might be relevant now.

On a related (but just as irrelevant) note, a friend of mine had one of the
production-defective CPUs from that machine that she wore on a pendant for
several years.

------
ynniv
It would be more interesting to link to COPACOBANA
[<http://www.copacobana.org/> ,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_hardware_attack>], which can do roughly
the same thing at 1/25th the cost ($10,000 vs $250,000) and is reprogrammable.

