EFF DES Cracker

The EFF DES cracker (also Deep Crack ) was a technology demonstrator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) from the year 1998. Using the device clearly claims from that U.S. government could be rebutted, the DES encryption process is only with a multi-million to break the budget and could not be broken even by state institutions. The budget for the building was $ 250,000, the unit was able to decrypt DES- encrypted messages within a few days by brute- force method.

Background

When DES encryption method, a message with a 56 -bit key is encrypted, so there are 256 or 72 quadrillion possible keys that are all tried the brute force method, until the correct key is found. At the time available 200 - MHz Pentium processors could process about a million keys per second, so that the search would have taken a single computer up to about 2000 years.

In 1997, the RSA Security organized a competition DES Challenges to demonstrate the weakness of DES against brute- force attacks. For the first time successful were the projects DESCHALL and Distributed.net that could break the key by distributed computing in 96 and 41 days with the help of thousands of volunteer participants.

Technology

The system consisted of 1856 application specific integrated circuits (ASIC ) with 24 DES processing units per chip package. On a total of 29 boards doppelseitien the chips were each 64 housed. The boards were designed as plug-in boards for Sun-4/470-Rack-Gehäuse and were mounted in six cases. A single computer coordinated the search of the search areas to the ASIC. ASIC were clocked at 30-40 MHz.

The plant processed 90 billion keys per second, sampling of all DES keys lasted nine days. Usually the key is found in half of the time. The plant would have been highly scalable by adding additional boards by a factor of 200, so that the search had lasted an average of half an hour.

Effects

Since a relatively small club with a manageable budget was already able to develop from commercially available technology a device that DES could break within a few days, consideration has been given, what speed could reach state institutions with a much higher budget. Extrapolations based on available technology at the time, budget and development time held devices in case size with speeds of one day, as well as investments in data center size at speeds in the range of seconds possible.

Thus, DES was no longer considered safe, with the FIPS standard 46-3 October 1999, DES will only be permitted for use on legacy systems.

225079
de