EFF DES Cracker - Technology

Technology

Deep Crack was designed by Cryptography Research, Inc., Advanced Wireless Technologies, and the EFF. The principal designer was Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1856 custom ASIC DES chips (called Deep Crack or AWT-4500), housed on 29 circuit boards of 64 chips each. The boards were then fitted in six cabinets and mounted in a Sun-4/470 chassis. The search was coordinated by a single PC which assigned ranges of keys to the chips. The entire machine was capable of testing over 90 billion keys per second. It would take about 9 days to test every possible key at that rate. On average, the correct key would be found in half that time.

In 2006, another custom hardware attack machine was designed based on FPGAs. COPACOBANA (COst-optimized PArallel COdeBreaker) shows a similar performance as Deep Crack at considerably lower cost. This advantage is mainly due to progress in integrated circuit technology. In July of 2012, security researchers David Hulton and Moxie Marlinspike unveiled a cloud computing tool for breaking the MSCHAPv2 protocol by recovering the protocol's DES encryption keys by brute force. This tool effectively allows members of the general public to recover a DES key from a known plaintext-ciphertext pair in about 24 hours.