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Open Source Attempt To Crack GSM Encryption
Lexta writes with an interesting tidbit from IEEE Spectrum: "'Karsten Nohl, chief research scientist with H4RDW4RE, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based security research firm, is mounting what could be the most ambitious attempt yet to compromise the GSM phone system.' The intended approach is to create an open source project to spread the computation of a giant look-up table across more than 80 machines. Interestingly, they've openly stated that nVidia's CUDA technology will be used to execute parallel elements of the problem on GPUs as well."
That's not the way you use a phone.
Saying they are anti-opensource is a bit much don't you think? They are a corporation who just haven't figured out how being open source would be more beneficial to them and their share-holders than remaining closed.
I believe if they were "anti-opensopurce" most people wouldn't have that nice nvidia wrapper for the driver on linux systems. Why waste time making it at all if they are "anti-opensource"?
Just because they haven't opened their code to the universe doesn't mean they are against open-source; just that they haven't found a means to leverage it to their advantage which companies like to do.
Businesses are about the bottom line, money, and how to make more and keep what they got. Opensource is about sharing and giving up control; it is a hard thing for a lot of companies to fit into their business plan and sell to investors.
The key phrases you are looking for are "rainbow tables"; "time / memory trade-off"; "distributed computing"; "embarrassingly parallel"; "GPGPU Computing" and probably "More's Law".
So now computers are faster than when they cooked that "100,000 years" phrase. They are employing many different computers with multiple cores. GPUs are much faster at this calculation that X86 processors. Rainbow tables are ingenious methods to store precomputed results, so the actual cracking is simple comparisons between encrypted text with known values and the data you are attacking.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Who wants it cracked in the first place? The only interests served are those of crooks and spys.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Woosh
H4RDW4RE?
Are we really supposed to take a company seriously, when its own name substitutes numerals for letters?
... and then they built the supercollider.