🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan10.060013.4644@csi.uottawa.ca> cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne) writes:
>It doesn't surprise me AT ALL that the NSA would have "lotsa
>supercomputers."  That kind of goes with the territory.  It also
>doesn't surprise me that they can consider breaking DES.  With the
>kind of computing horsepower they've got, brute force can't be THAT
>hard.

As the old joke goes, a Cray can execute any infinite loop in under 6
seconds. :-)

Crays aren't quite as fast as you think. And they're probably not
especially cost-effective for direct, brute-force searches of the DES
keyspace, unless of course somebody has discovered some significant
shortcut.  An array of special purpose processors would be much faster
and far more cost-effective.

NSA undoubtedly uses its Crays mainly for signal processing.  Remember
that before the cryptanalysts can get their ciphertext bits, you have
to extract them somehow from the terabits of raw broadband digital
tape recordings made by the intercept sites.  For example, if
frequency hopped spread spectrum is used, one way to attack it is to
demodulate every channel in the entire hopping range, an obviously
CPU-intensive job.  With their fast floating point and pipelined
vector processing capabilities, Crays are ideally suited for this kind
of number crunching.

Phil