Cracking PGP In the Cloud

pariax writes "So you wanna build your own massively distributed password cracking infrastructure? Electric Alchemy has published a writeup detailing their experiences cracking PGP ZIP archives using brute force computing power provided by Amazon EC2 and a distributed password cracker from Elcomsoft."

Comments

Re:And tons of carbon enter the air

[plover]

It wasn't carbon, but the fuel consumed that was my first thought. Back when distributed.net was busy burning energy to win these pointless challenges, I did some rough calculations on the electricity required to solve it.

Turns out that the energy spent breaking RC5-64 used somewhere between 2 and 50 *trains* full of coal.

And that was only the energy directly consumed by the computers involved, and not any of the heating or cooling costs associated with it. And sure, more modern CPUs are more energy efficient, and I extrapolated the figures from a lot of published sources and made a lot of assumptions. But regardless of CO2 or greenhouse gasses or dirty coal or any of that environmental stuff, that's a lot of irreplaceable fossil fuel that's now gone.

I don't think it's sad or tainted to consider the overall impact of what you do. Saying "oh, I want to help search for E.T." is one thing. It may cost you an extra 1440 kWh/day, but you have the money, no big deal. But understanding that SETI@HOME is causing tens of thousands of people around the globe to collectively burn tons of fuel every day might make some of the volunteers rethink their decision. Ignoring that is the kind of perspective that thoughtlessly sucks up our finite resources.

And no, I don't consider alien hunting a valuable use of energy, at least not at this time in our history. Once we have fusion reactors or some other form of "free energy", all that will change.

Go ahead and crack keys, search for Extra Terrestrials, or fold proteins, or whatever you want to do with your box. Leave your lights on 24x7. Run the furnace and the air conditioner together. Just understand that what you do today has an impact, and consider the value of the outcome.