Shamir reveals more about optical 512-bit cracker

MattJ writes "The AP reports that Shamir (the 'S' in RSA) has revealed more details of his optical 512-bit cracking machine, TWINKLE, at a cryptography conference. " It's a pretty darn cool machine, and at only 2 million dollars, it'll be a bargain *grin*!

Comments

do a little research then

[rillian]

... if for no other reason than a lack of information.

A paper from the first announcement of this back in May is available in a couple of places (zipped eps and postscript), as well as an analysis by RSA. see also the RISKS posting.

If you meant just that the design is untried, I suppose this won't convince you, though optical computers of this sort have been build (on a much smaller scale) before. Anyway, we have this thing called "engineering" for figuring out if something's going to work or not. :)

I don't seen any new information on the web. Can someone from the conference let us know what progress has been made on the design front?

Not relevant

[anticypher]

Yes, there were many different architectures of computers back in the 70's. Some were 36 bit (DEC PDP-10), some were 72 bit (Burroughs something), and others had "really big words" of 128 bits. There was no standard, just whatever the engineers decided was big enough.

Intel and others are just now getting to true 64 bit architecture because they are sticking it all on one chip. That doesn't mean the government had 64 bit chips 30 years ago. They just bought whatever the computer manufacturers made at the time, and I'm sure some of them internally had 64+ bits of bus width or accumulator space.

The U.S. government classified teflon (PTFE) during the war, because it was used to line pipes in uranium extraction equipment. But a french chemist discovered the same thing in 1957, and took out a patent on it, then sold the patent to a frying pan company so they could make non-stick pans. A few years later the U.S. government discovered what was going on when the pans started showing up in department stores and went ape shit.

They made one attempt asking the french government to classify the substance before they realised it was a hopeless cause. The french like to recall this story every time the U.S. tries to get europeans to do things the 'Merkin way. Its the same for encryption.

If Shamir is touting this design, I think it is more to scare people into believing short keys are soon to be crackable, and this will get them to demand much longer keys. The design is very "blue sky", with all the emphasis on optical computing on a very large scale. But if OC takes off in the next few years, then any university with an OC lab could produce a machine like this as a student group project. Then all the short key length RSA protected systems are at risk. Shamir is just trying to bump the key length up to something reasonable for the next decade or so.

my .02 euros,
the AC