Brute Force

foreword by John Gilmore October 2004
56 bit DES from NBS in 1975
NBS claimed 6000 6 foot racks with a million chips
Hellman and Diffie suggested 16,000 chips
1982, RSA Data Security
1997 Jan 28, RSA offers $10K prize for DES
Mar 20, House: Security And Freedom through Encryption (SAFE) act, Senate: Pro-CODE
- p53 NSA claimed DES crack required $30M supercomputer and 450 days
Jan Rocke Verser freelance Loveland CO writes first DESCHALL clients
Feb 22 author at Megasoft Online, Columbus OH starts running DESCHALL
Mar 29 mailing list
Apr 1 DESCHALL 0.162% of keyspace
Apr 8 Press releases
Apr 2 Oregon State
Apr 9 ... Big 11T, Med 11T, small 2T keys processed
Apr 12 ... OSU 4.3T, RPI 3.3T,
Apr 17, more than 2500 computers, 50T keys per day
Apr 22, 1 quadrillion keys
Apr 18, Darrell Kindred bitslicing
May 2 ... UIUC, 17T, OSU 7.3T
May 10 ... UIUC and GIT 22.3T each
May 9 First bitslice clients deployed
May 10 Test rate 260T/day
May 26 13% keys tested
Jun 5 16,5% keys tested
Jun 12 another Kindred speedup
Jun 15 test rate 600T/day
1997 Jun 17 Key found, Michael Sanders on iNetZ in SLC Utah, 90 MHz Pentium
- key 8558891AB0C851B6, message "Strong cryptography manes the world a safer place"
- "fatal flaws in administration's Bill S.909 by McCain R-AZ and Kerrey D-NE
- 1998 Jul 13 DES-II-2, 56 hours by EFF Deep Crack, $250K of orbit chips
- 1998 Jan 18 DES-III, 22 hours by Deep Crack + distributed.net