PGP problems

[Steve Lamb]

Friday, August 04, 2000, 9:59:26 AM, Ralph wrote:
> Not really.  With the right ASICs and a good parallel processing setup
> the costs may be astronomical but the time factor shouldn't be too bad.

    Well, from the dnet rc5-64 page they have been running for 2.78 years,
will require another 3.6 years to exhaust the total key space.  That's 6+
years of constant cracking from 15-30+ thousand machines worldwide.

    Now, just ponder this for a moment.  That's for 64 bits.  56 bits dnet can
crack in under a week, easy.  They've done it in, IIRC, a day and a half once.
But a week is what is needed to exhaust the key space.  Add another 8 bits, it
goes from a week to 6 years.  What is the smallest PGP key in 2.6.x?  256
bits?  PGP 5.x and above have, what, 2048 at the high end?

>>> math.pow(2,56)
7.20575940379e+016
>>> math.pow(2,64)
1.84467440737e+019
>>> math.pow(2,256)
1.15792089237e+077
>>> math.pow(2,1023)
8.98846567431e+307

    After 1023 Pyton pukes on me.

    Let's play with some numbers.

Seconds in a year: 3156000.
Number of years 56 bits represents:                                                                                 2,284,931,317.79
                64                :                                                                               584,942,417,355
               256                : 3,671,743,063,080,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

    Remember, we can do the first in a week, the second in ~6 years.  Even
given Moore's Law it is going to take quite a few years before we can break
256 with brute fource in a human lifetime, much less in a reasonable time
frame.  And that is a "weak" key for PGP.

    In short, if the NSA could set up something even 1/100th the power of
dnet, I would truly be amazed.

--- Stats from dnet as of today ---

Aggregate Statistics
   
Total Blocks to Search: 68,719,476,736
Total Blocks Tested: 19,943,564,893
Keyspace Checked: 29.022%
Total Keys Tested: 5,353,559,936,318,046,208
Time Working: 1,016 days
Overall Rate: 60,986,712 KKeys/sec

Current Information
   
36,969,678 blocks were completed yesterday (0.054% of the keyspace) at a
sustained rate of 114,860,791 KKeys/sec!
   
The odds are 1 in 1,319 that we will wrap this thing up in the next 24 hours.
(This also means that we'll exhaust the keyspace in 1,319 days at yesterday's
rate.)
   
There have been 262,548 participants since the beginning of this project.
38,525 of them were active yesterday and of those, 134 were brand-new
participants.
   
There are 9,963 registered teams. 4,737 of them submitted blocks yesterday. (2
of them are brand new!)
   

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
         ICQ: 5107343          | main connection to the switchboard of souls. 
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