Re: Last nail for US crypto export policy?

Robert Harley (Robert.Harley@inria.fr)
Thu, 30 Jan 1997 09:30:08 +0100 (MET)


>>Ian Goldberg [...] announced today that he had successfully cracked RSA
>>Data Security Inc.'s 40-bit challenge cipher in just under 3.5 hours.

>Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this will have any effect at all on
>US crypto export policy, whose aim is precisely and avowedly to try to
>make sure that people *don't* get access to encryption technology that
>might prove a challenge to someone with access to a half million
>dollars' worth of stock hardware...

The first guy to break it used that much. Rajit and myself broke it
too in ten times as much time on ten times less hardware i.e., mostly
old Unix boxes which will soon be in a scrap heap unless some recycler
buys them by weight. The same compute power on chips with good MIPS/$
such as StrongARM could be bought for $500 to $800. You'd pay as much
for the screen to look at the result on ;)

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>From challenge-administrator@RSA.COM Thu Jan 30 09:17:06 1997
[...]
To: Robert.Harley@inria.fr
Status: R

Good work! Your submission to the RSADSI RC5-32/12/5 challenge is correct.

Unfortunately, your submission came too late. The RC5-32/12/5 challenge is already over.

Good luck with the other cryptography challenges!

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>From Robert.Harley@inria.fr Wed Jan 29 23:16:16 1997
[...]
To: crypto-challenge@RSA.COM
Subject: RC5-32/12/5

challenge: RC5-32/12/5
solution: f0 43 f1 81 31
name: Robert Joseph Harley and Rajit Vasant Manohar
address: 20, rue de la Justice
92310 Sevres, France
email: Robert.Harley@inria.fr
phone: (+ 33) 1 4507 8909 or (+ 33) 1 4626 5359 or (+ 33) 1 3963 5753
time: < 34 hours at roughly 2 BIPS on Unix boxes at INRIA and CalTech
method: Brute force search
done:
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