Re: Crays vs <?>

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

Jason Plonk writes:

> 	There has been a lot of type of what kind of resources the US (in
> particluar the NSA) has in defeating various encryption schemes.  I've read
> that they have 100+ Crays scattered throughout the country.
> 	My question is this, what kind of systems is the "other" side using?
> The US has export restrictions on super computers, such as the Cray.  I know
> for a fact that the US .gov wouldn't allow the sale of a Cray to India,
> because .gov thought that it could be used in the manufacture of weapons.  

The "other" side? I don't think the Cypherpunks have _any_ Crays all
for themselves, though some Cypherpunks work in rooms full of Crays
and at least several of them work with networks of many hundreds of
workstations.

Or by "other" side did you mean the Medellin Cartel and the importers
for illegal and politically incorrect novels?

Surely you didn't mean our new trading partners in Russia?

On a more serious note, strong crypto will allow "foreigners" to send
computing jobs to sites nearly anywhere in the world and have them run
on compute servers. So much for export controls on the physical
hardware!

(And the "computing with encrypted instances" work of Joan Feigenbaum
and others means in principle that the site doing the computing may
not even be able to tell if they're computing bomb yields or crop
watering schedules.)

--Tim

-- 
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Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
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