DES-Busting Screen Savers?

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 8:28 PM 7/22/96, aba@atlas.ex.ac.uk wrote:

>Hmm, 56 bits is a lot of bits...
>
>Here's some calcuations of my own for your criticism...

>So ideally for a break you would like the whole thing to be completed
>in say 2 weeks wall clock time, which gives rise to the need for
>~100,000 machines of similar throughput, full-time for two weeks.

Or several times that number of machines or time for machines with less
crunch. Say, 100K Pentium-type machines for a month or two. How might this
be gotten?

A while back I proposed one approach: a brute force "screen saver" for
Windows machines. Other platforms, maybe, but the most cost-effective thing
to do is to go after the Windows market only.

Instead of bouncing balls around the screen, or whatever screen savers like
"After Dark" are doing these days, it could flash messages about "Working
on a crack of ...." and perhaps show bar graphs, etc. Maybe some flashy
graphics, some Cypherpunkish slogans, etc. That is, an attractive enough
screen saver module in its own right that people would be perhaps inclined
to leave it running.

(I know that "After Dark" publishes the specs on its program and encourages
third-party drop-in modules...some have been successful enough to be
marketed by the vendor. I presume this is still the case, and with Windows,
too.)

Acquiring chunks of keyspace remains an issue, but I think we resolved a
while back that a probabalistic method works OK: people just pick chunks at
random, and the decreased efficiency as compared to perfect scheduling is
something like a factor of a couple (I have the numbers I calculated
somewhere, and I recall Hal Finney made the same estimate).

Some means of communicating results--especially wins!--is still needed.
This is where Perry's idea of a Java program is a good one.


>As far as cash prizes go how much could cypherpunks and friends
>generate for such a purpose?  I'd guess individuals could come up with
>a fair bit of money... 1000+ list members x 10$ = 10k (or whatever).

More realistically, 1000+ list members x 10% who make plans to contribute x
half of these who actually follow through x $10 = $500. (If that....)

Prizes have their place, but are hard to set up properly.


--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
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