A89: Re: PR Hit -- Those bastards


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A89: Re: PR Hit -- Those bastards




>As for that 3rd  option under unrealistic. There is a possibility to that 
though.
>My comp spends months at a time up and 90% of that time it's idle on irc
>or something to that end. It's a p3 500 with 128 meg of ram ... if we ALL
>devoted our idle time to crack it we could have it in a few months *maybe*
>I know the 56bit keys take years sometimes but it's worth our idle time to
>try. If someone would write a program to either randomly generate keys
>and test them or use the brute force method I'd happily donate infinite
>amounts of time to the cause. I think it's entirely possible to break it
>and we may get lucky. And in the mean time we can get the best of the
>best to break open the rom.

Time to put your calc to use...


Assuming it's a 512-bit key as someone else mentioned, there are about 
1.341e154 possible keys. At say 2 million keys/sec on a typical system 
running 24 hours a day and every one of us participating (maybe 1000 people)  
thats:

(2^512)/(2000000keyspersec * 1000people * (60*60*24*365.24)) = 2.1244e137 
years to cover the entire keyspace.  If we try it for a year we have a: 
1/2.1244e137 chance of finding the correct key,  Keeping in mind that it's 
4am and the math might be off a few trillion.  Just guessing, but I think you 
have a better chance of locating a particular iron atom located somewhere in 
the universe.  Any chance it's really something moderately practical, like 
56-bit? 

As someone else said it would be much easier to just find someone who knows 
what the key is. (didn't someone already say they found it?)


--Vincent