Re: Why crack more than 40bit RC5 keys? (WAS RE: RC5, hiding

Dennis Okon (dokon@mit.edu)
Sun, 11 May 1997 22:39:12 -0400

>With an investment of as little as $400 on some basic FPGA equipment,
>this problem can be solved at a much greater speed. With a bigger
>FPGA, or use of ASIC, the speed with which keys can be found by brute
>force is frightening, and when considered on a per-key basis,
>frighteningly cheap (as low as $0.08 per key).

Hmm... FPGA. I just realized, MIT is changing 6.004, Computation
Structures, which is a EECS-major required class from using 8-bit homemade
computers (affectionately known as "Nerd Kits") to new Nerd Kits which use
FPGA chips. Each kit usually has 5 chips. Each class will have about 350
students per semester. That means a computer with up to 1750 FPGA chips.
So, if anybody wants to send me the schematics, I could port it to the
chips. I can always talk to the head TA and see what I can do.

Actually, like most of MIT's bureaucracy, I don't think there's any chance
of me being able to tie up all of these chips.

-Dennis