Re: fast des

[smb@research.att.com]

The DEC gigabit/second DES chip was based on the FURY VSC15K gate array
from Vitesse.  It's a gallium arsenide device.

The full paper is ``A High-speed DES Implementation for Network
Applications'', by Hans Eberle, SRC Research Report 90, DEC Systems
Research Center.  Abstracts are (apparently) online in
pub/DEC/srcabstracts.list, on gatekeeper.pa.dec.com.  You can get
hard-copy by sending email to src-report@src.dec.com.

Oh yeah -- he gives the search time as 16 days, for about $1M in DES
chips alone, without any support circuitry.  The chips are estimated
to cost $300 apiece.  His chip is well-suited for DES-cracking because
it has a separate key-loading port, so you can change the key each
cycle without slowing down the pipeline.