On 02/23/2009 06:12 PM, Chris Jones wrote:
On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 02:34:26PM EST, Ron Johnson wrote:Given enough time, and resources, *nothing* is untouchable. It's just a matter of whether They think that the time-effort is worth being spent on *you*.Like, twenty times the estimated life of the universe.. a thousand times its mass in silicon chips. Everyone involved long dead anyways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker
When DES was approved as a federal standard in 1976, a machine
fast enough to test that many keys in a reasonable time would
have cost an unreasonable amount of money to build.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker#Technology
Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1856 custom ASIC DES chips
(called Deep Crack or AWT-4500), housed on 29 circuit boards of
64 chips each. The boards are then fitted in six cabinets. The
search is coordinated by a single PC which assigns ranges of keys
to the chips. The entire machine was capable of testing over 90
billion keys per second. It would take about 9 days to test every
possible key at that rate. On average, the correct key would be
found in half that time.
In the 11 years since Deep Crack, IC process technology has improved
by leaps and bounds, and the NSA can throw a whole lot of h/w in
parallel at brute-force attacks.
Combine that with Side Channel Attacks (easy if you have the machine that did the encryption, and which can discover part of the key) and mathematical analysis to determine even more of the key, you suddenly see something feasible.
Of course, all this effort would not be spent on a dissident with some "naughty books".
+1 on RHD and messier (and subtler} techniques... way to go.
-- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA The feeling of disgust at seeing a human female in a Relationship with a chimp male is Homininphobia, and you should be ashamed of yourself.