EFF Builds DES Cracking Hardware for DESChall II
Saturday, July 18th, 1998The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has built specialized hardware consisting to attack the DESChall II partial known plaintext cryptanalysis challenge. The specialized machine, know as “Deep Crack” consists of 1,856 chips that implement the relevant specialized DES code needed to find the correct key that will decrypt the unknown remaining plain text. Deep Crack costed less that $250,000 USD to build. It is capable of testing more that 90 billion keys per second giving it the ability to work through the entire 2^56 possibilities in the 56 bit keyspace in about five days.
The “Deep Crack” source code has been placed on the internet for download.
The EEF has created a web page for their hardware based DES Challenge II attack.
EFF Press Release Regarding the System:
EFF DES CRACKER MACHINE BRINGS HONESTY TO CRYPTO DEBATE
Electronic Frontier Foundation Proves That DES Is Not Secure
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today raised the level of honesty in crypto politics by revealing that the Data Encryption Standard (DES) is insecure. The U.S. government has long pressed industry to limit encryption to DES (and even weaker forms), without revealing how easy it is to crack. Continued adherence to this policy would put critical infrastructures at risk; society should choose a different course.