Re: World record in password checking

["Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>]

peter honeyman says:
> why doesn't this impress me?  i'll tell you why.  with
> 
> o   a stock version of des (dennis ferguson's), which is written in c,
>     and not optimized for any particular chip or vector hardware
> 
> o   a no-name 50 Mhz 486, which you can buy for under $1,000 at fry's
> 
> o   netbsd, a freely available general purpose operating system
> 
> i have measured 29,000 des crypts per second. 
> 
> now give me a "1,024 node" machine made of of these -- admittedly
> unwieldy, but no doubt a hell of a lot cheaper than a 1,024 node CM/5
> (and a hell of a lot more useful, imho) -- and i can run at three times
> the "world record" rate.

You can do even better if you happen to have 2000 sparcstations which
are idle for 16 hours a day. Myself, I wonder how many machines we
would need for a net parallel DES crack.

Perry