Re: OT - Supercomputers

[Gonz]

Just sit back and enjoy the security.  That little 36.1 Tera-FLOP is 
just a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of power it would take 
to crack the 2048 code, much less the 4096 one.   36.1 Tera-FLOPS is 
36.1 x 10^15 flops.  If you remember that post before, if each quark in 
the universe was able to run at 10^15 flops (1 Teraflop), then all the 
quarks in the universe could not crack the 4096 (or 2048) code before it 
went cold.  So tell us again how many of these computers are you going 
to use?  Even if you built one 100x faster tomorrow, it still wouldnt 
matter.   Somewhere you must be doing linear math when it takes 
exponential formulas to make the right estimates. I.e. a 2048 bit cipher 
of this type is 2^1024 times more computationally complex than a cipher 
with 1024 bits, not twice as complex, as would be estimated by an 
erroneous linear guess.  That means adding just 7 more bits gives you a 
100 fold (128 to be exact) increase in the amount of computations, 
accounting for the next generation of computers quite easily.

Believe us when we say that brute force is not going to cut it.  The 
government is much more likely to put a bug in your computer to get the 
key or the data than to try to crack the code, which is for all intents 
and purposes impossible.  I'm telling you that even if Al-Queda was 
communicating their next terrorist plans via a 2048 PGP or RSA cipher, 
there is nothing the NSA/CIA/FBI could do about it, except try and get 
the info some other way.  Luckily it appears that they may not be that 
smart or trusting, so they communicate via old fashion ways, which are 
succeptible to interception.

rg
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I just did a little research (very little actually). The current fastest 
supercomputer is made by IBM and just beat out NEC at 36.1 Tera-FLOPS 
(trillion floating point opreations per second). Next year they will be 
delivering one with almost 10 times that power. Even a little 1 cabinet 
Cray XD1 does 5 G-FLOPS (billion flops) and will only set you back $100K 
or so.

Tell me again how secure your cipher is from brut force decryption 
(grin). Next year's IBM should be able to do that 2048 bit jobby in one 
year all by its lonesome.

BTW the IBM uses AMD processors and most likely runs Linux. I find it 
amazing that current state of the art supercomputers are just like our 
desktops only they have a few more proccessors (16000 or so).