Viewing Single Post From: The NSA May Read My Mail

Viewing Single Post From: The NSA May Read My Mail
insecure	Oct 18 2005, 06:47 PM
Elite member Posts: 381 Group: Trusted Member Member #10 Joined: September 9, 2005	Let's give them 15 minutes, which is 900 seconds - in fact, let's give them 1000 seconds - and there are 3000 of them. 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations to try. Keys per processor = 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 / 3000 = approx 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Keys per processor per second = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So all you have to do is find three thousand processors each of which is capable of testing a key against a ciphertext and analysing the resulting plaintext, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times a second. Assuming your processor design is custom-built and dedicated to the task (which makes it pretty well useless for anything else), and assuming it can do an entire test in a single clock cycle (BIG asssumption), you just need a processor running at 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 GHz - i.e. approximately a hundred thousand million million million times as fast as a typical family desktop PC.


The NSA May Read My Mail · Debates