About: The EFF DES Cracker Hardware
This stuff frankly can crack a DES key in a day. Respect that.
Introduction
In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed “Deep Crack“) is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to perform a brute force search of DES’s keyspace; that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that DES’s key is not long enough to be secure.
DES Specifictions
DES uses a 56-bit key, meaning that there are 256 possible keys under which a message can be encrypted. This is approximately 7.21 × 1016 (more than 72 quadrillion). When DES was approved as a federal standard in 1976, it was thought that a machine fast enough to test that many keys in a reasonable time would cost an unreasonable amount of money to build, or that a machine cheap enough to be reasonable could not test that many keys in a reasonable time.
The Challenge
In 1998 the EFF built deep crack. It cost them $250,000 to build it alone. In response to DES Challenge II-2 on July 17, 1998, Deep Crack decrypted a DES-encrypted message after only 56 hours of work, winning $10,000, go them. This was a blow to the heralded Secure NSA algo, it clearly wasn’t , and never was, and has always been crackable by the NSA. They designed it, if I was part of the National Security agency I personally would not design an algorithm that could be used to defraud not only me and my friends, but my government, and my country. Are people really that stupid? Well maybe, but I dont think this is the case.
DES Cracker Technology
Deep crack was designed by Cryptography Research INC, advanced wireless Technologies and the EFF. The prinicpal designer was Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1856 custom DES Chips, housed on no less than 29 circuit boards each comprising of a total of 64 chips. The boards were fitted with six cabinets. The Search is co-ordinated by a single PC which assigns ranges of keys to the chips , its a small hardware cluster.
“Boy, I really need to get my hands on some of this tech.”
The Entire machine was capable of testing over 90 billion keys per second. It would take about 5 days to test every possible key at that rate. This is serious stuff guys. A few hundred of these and the government would easily be cracking 3DES! I think, comments welcome.
Azio’s Computer Log » What Is DES and 3DES? said,
October 19, 2006 @ 8:15 pm
[...] Best public cryptanalysis: DES is now considered insecure because a brute force attack is possible (see EFF DES cracker). As of 2004, the best analytical attack is linear cryptanalysis, which requires 243 known plaintexts and has a time complexity of 239-43 (Junod, 2001); under a chosen-plaintext assumption, the data complexity can be reduced by a factor of four (Knudsen and Mathiassen, 2000). [...]