Caolan McNamara wrote:
> >40-bit RC4 should be easy enough to crack in that timescale with a few
> >decent Celerons and a dash of hand crafted assembly.
> How much is a celeron chip ?
About IR£160 after VAT for the 466MHz Socket370 one, about £90 for a
400MHz processor.
> They suggest that those on lower budgets could
> try using fpga's, but they say that that would be much slower. I suspect
> that celeron's would be prohibitivly expensive for that amount, and wouldn;t
> be as effective as custom chips.
40-bit encryption is a joke. For custom hardware like that you're
probably looking at a minimum of £5,000 to get yourself a designed and
tested FPGA, something to put it in, and controlling software. For that
amount you could easily put together 4GHz worth of Celeron processing
power. You'd probably need some smart code that makes use of 64-bit MMX
instructions to get the best out of them. I would be very suprised if
40-bit RC4 lasted more than a day or two with that kind of power arrayed
against it.
Paul.
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