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IBM Retakes Fastest Supercomputer Title
dshaw858 writes "BBC News reports that IBM has unveiled its new Blue Gene/L machine. The Blue Gene project already has two of the top ten supercomputers in the world. Big news for IBM! I wonder what great things they can calculate in just seconds now... maybe I should get a stronger PGP key."
...this time, it's from NASA. http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/nasa_super computer_040809.html
There's been a lot of turnover recently. For those of you keeping track at home, it's now:
IBM BlueGene/L (70.7 teraflops, up from36 in your article)
(?) NEC SX-8 (Not yet installed anywhere; estimated 58.5)
NASA/SGI Columbia (42.7)
NEC Earth Simulator (35.9)
So no PGP key cracking. At least officially.
You really need something more than just a really fast/powerful computer to do PGP cracking. You're going to need something that can help you get your fingernails under the problem, because even this machine couldn't brute force PGP keys. There has been some papers written on theoretical weaknesses in RSA that, given a custom built machine, could be exploited. This is not a custom built RSA cracker. It may have enough raw power to make up for that of course, and that means you might manage 1024 bit RSA cracking if you are determined. Unfortunately any sane PGP/GPG users are using Diffie-Hellman/El-Gamal rather than RSA as their public key system, and for now there aren't any similar attacks for the discrete log problem as there are for factoring.
Your paranoia is misplaced. You should be worried that the NSA has come up with a serious break in RSA and Diffie-Hellman schemes that let them be cracked by a nice ordinary supercomputer, rather than worried about computer power overtaking key size. Most key sizes are chosen to have a fairly long lifespan even with massive increases in computing power. You aren't going to brute force 128bit symmetric systems any time soon, no matter how much computing power you stack up against it. No, the fear is in breaks to the encryption scheme.
Jedidiah.
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The parent poster is referring to this book, which was from about three years ago.
I have read it. It's fundamentally a hatchet job. IBM was the prime supplier of Hollerith punched card machines worldwide, whether they were sorters or keypunch machines or whatever. The fact that they supplied them to the Nazis was used to create a conspiracy whereby IBM favored the extermination of Jews.
The book appeared to be angling to tarnish Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, primarily, rather than the modern company.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
That html works anywhere, its an absolute path on the current server (slashdot.org) the path is
The test is called linpack.
http://www.top500.org/lists/linpack.php
Aren't Diffie-Hellman and El Gamal just key exchange methods? I didn't know they had anything to do with the encryption itself...
Diffie-Hellman is just key exchange, El-Gamal is effectively using Diffie-Hellman style operations for encryption. The important thing to remember is that PGP/GPG only uses the public key aspect for key exchange. The message itself in encrypted with a symmetric cipher scheme, and the public key is simply used to exchange the one time key for the symmetric cipher for that particular message.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts