Re: Netscape security

[koontz@MasPar.COM (David G. Koontz)]

>Now, I can see calling a MasPar a "parallel supercomputer"; another effort
>at the SSL challenge got the answer about 2 hours before Damien's did,
>and used about 4 days of spare time on the MasPar.  Last time I looked,
>a MasPar was selling for about $150K, though I don't know how big the one
>used on SSL was.  At that price, you could have your own for ~$500/day,
>and ripping off $2000 on a credit card isn't tough in today's automated world.
>Next year - computer time costs half as much.
 
Well, lets put it this way, an MP-2 with 16K processors could attack a 56 bit
key about as fast as a 486 could attack a 40 bit key.   The next generation
MP will be less than an order of magnitude faster, although able to use
more processors.

An MP2 with 1K processors can do 220K crypt(3)/sec.  Now, if it weren't so
darned hard to program one for performance...

One tends to wonder if there are analytical methods to reduce the search
space.