Imported from previous forum
[ original email was from Ryan Pierce - rpierce@taltrade.com ]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group, constructed a DES cracking computer for less than $250,000 which succeded in brute forcing a 56-bit DES key as part of a contest sponsored by RSA. They recovered the key after searching almost 25% of the keyspace in 56 hours…
More information is available at http://www.eff.org/descracker.html
[ original email was from Ryan Pierce - rpierce@taltrade.com ]
In the latest RSA-sponsored contest, DES has been cracked again in 22 hours 15 minutes, after searching 22.2% of the key space. It was done by a collaboration of thousands of computers across the Internet working in parallel with the EFF DES cracker that won the previous contest.