Can the NSA brute force RC6? Probably.

Anonymous Cypherpunk writes "The latest Cryptogram Newsletter has an interesting link to a paper about the feasability of building a RC6 cracking machine much like the EFF's Deep Crack DES cracker. The proposed machine would cost roughly $280 million and be able to crack a 64-bit key in an average of only 3.58 minutes. "

Comments

What you should know about the NSA....

[Silverpike]

Funny to see that article by the EFF. They have no idea how much they have underestimated the NSA.

I used to work for a company called Annapolis Micro Systems (Annapolis, MD). They specialize in selling high performance configurable computing boards (both VME and PCI versions). These boards are especially suited to numerically intense algorithms (image processing, encryption).

It's no big surprise that the single biggest customer of AMS is the NSA. They routinely bought Wildfire arrays (see website) by the dozens. Two guesses as to what they were using them for, and the first doesn't count...

It must be emphasized what kind of power these arrays confer. Anyone familiar with configurable computing knows several things:
1) It's not for the light of wallet.
2) It requires a hefty design overhead for each application.
3) It presents the fastest known solutions to almost every NP-complete and iterative solution problem ever posed.

I am a hardware designer by trade, and I can tell you that is almost beyond my ability to measure what kind of processing power these boards can enable, purchased in groups.

Be afraid, be very afraid...

(Author's note: from my limited knowledge of encryption, keys larger than 1024 bytes probably aren't crackable by brute force in this day).