5 ms·

Maybe I'm wrong, but unless you are ready to bring a chip to market, it seems to me this ship has sailed. That said, I'm a chip designer with ASIC experience.

Maybe I'm wrong, but unless you are ready to bring a chip to market, it seems to me this ship has sailed. That said, I'm a chip designer with ASIC experience. I think it would be pretty fun to work with a couple software oriented folks to design and build something here. ASIC design software tools would probably require funding, but FPGA prototyping can be done at very low cost.

yuhong 13y ago
I wonder if anyone have designed chips to crack DES to actually sell. I am thinking of MS-CHAPv2 in particular.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Not sure about MS-CHAPv2, but you've seen this? http://www.copacobana.org/ http://www.copacobana.org/
- lcampbell 13y ago
  Cloudcrack has a 40-core FPGA solution that allegedly can break MS-CHAPv2 in a day[1]. Looks like they charge $100/lookup[2]. -- [1] https://www.cloudcracker.com/blog/2012/07/29/cracking-ms-chap-v2/ https://www.cloudcracker.com/blog/2012/07/29/cracking-ms-cha... [2] https://www.cloudcracker.com/dictionaries.html https://www.cloudcracker.com/dictionaries.html (in the mouseover text in the graph for brute-forcing DES keys).
- zxcvgm 13y ago
  For crypto applications there isn't a strong enough financial incentive to design an ASIC specifically to do that. Maybe a GPU-based solution like oclHashcat[1] can be extended to do that. [1] http://hashcat.net/ http://hashcat.net/
  - schoen 13y ago
    There might be a financial incentive to make hardware to crack crypto to sell to governments, which could use the hardware to spy on people. In other contexts government contractors do make surveillance hardware, like IMSI catchers. Because the crypto involved is so easy to attack, it's possible to imagine someone building a passive cell phone monitoring box with ASICs in it. I haven't looked through the relevant stuff in the Spy Files (vendor presentations from the ISS World surveillance conference), but that might be one place to look to find people making crypto-cracking ASICs for a profit. http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html They only have documents through 2011, although the conference is still happening frequently.
    - zhemao 13y ago
      How do you know government intelligence agencies don't have that sort of hardware already?
waterlesscloud 13y ago
Yeah, the ship has pretty much sailed. Products are either being delivered or are very close to shipping. Some of the smaller operations worked much as you imagine, though. They did FPGA prototypes and then raised funds to move to ASICs. They often raised funds on the bitcoin-denominated stock exchanges. A handful of guys could raise money via an ipo, get the chips produced, open an operation, and then share the revenue with shareholders via dividends. Some operations were just a couple of project manager outsourcing all the engineering and manufacturing. In at least once case, the ASIC design was done via ODesk (!) It was a risky business, on both ends. The investors rarely knew much about the people they were giving money to, and the entrepreneurs were taking money from people they didn't know much about. With no guarantees that anyone had any idea what they were doing. Those companies are reaching their endgames now, having either worked out ok or failed. Millions of dollars have been made, and much money has been lost. It's been fascinating to watch. It's a crazy pace and intensity even for a bunch of startups. There's a nice book in telling their stories, if anyone could actually find any of the people involved. Ha. Worth looking at for their stories- ASICMIner, the first wildly successful ASIC IPO. Active Mining, a rare US based company that IPOed. LabCoin- A company that may or may not have been a scam, but is in the process of failing.
hershel 13y ago
Like you said , this ship has sailed. Maybe there's an open market in memchached acceleration(basically computing hashes). Convey does this with FPGA's[1], and offers 3x performance/$. Or maybe other cloud compute acceleration stuff. I wonder though: if we're talking about using someone like easic.com( so scaling a business would be less risky and more investor friendly, since they can do low and mid volumes) ,How would the investment costs would look like(for 45nm/28nm) ? [1]http://www.enterprisetech.com/2013/09/24/convey-revs-memcached-hybrid-x86-fpga-appliance/ http://www.enterprisetech.com/2013/09/24/convey-revs-memcach...
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  eASIC is who the mining company Active Mining I mentioned below partnered with. http://thegenesisblock.com/easic-announces-24-ths-hash-fast-miner-activemining-shares-move-70/ http://thegenesisblock.com/easic-announces-24-ths-hash-fast-...

yuhong 13y ago

I wonder if anyone have designed chips to crack DES to actually sell. I am thinking of MS-CHAPv2 in particular.

DanBC 13y ago
Not sure about MS-CHAPv2, but you've seen this? http://www.copacobana.org/ http://www.copacobana.org/
lcampbell 13y ago
Cloudcrack has a 40-core FPGA solution that allegedly can break MS-CHAPv2 in a day[1]. Looks like they charge $100/lookup[2]. -- [1] https://www.cloudcracker.com/blog/2012/07/29/cracking-ms-chap-v2/ https://www.cloudcracker.com/blog/2012/07/29/cracking-ms-cha... [2] https://www.cloudcracker.com/dictionaries.html https://www.cloudcracker.com/dictionaries.html (in the mouseover text in the graph for brute-forcing DES keys).
zxcvgm 13y ago
For crypto applications there isn't a strong enough financial incentive to design an ASIC specifically to do that. Maybe a GPU-based solution like oclHashcat[1] can be extended to do that. [1] http://hashcat.net/ http://hashcat.net/
- schoen 13y ago
  There might be a financial incentive to make hardware to crack crypto to sell to governments, which could use the hardware to spy on people. In other contexts government contractors do make surveillance hardware, like IMSI catchers. Because the crypto involved is so easy to attack, it's possible to imagine someone building a passive cell phone monitoring box with ASICs in it. I haven't looked through the relevant stuff in the Spy Files (vendor presentations from the ISS World surveillance conference), but that might be one place to look to find people making crypto-cracking ASICs for a profit. http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html They only have documents through 2011, although the conference is still happening frequently.
  - zhemao 13y ago
    How do you know government intelligence agencies don't have that sort of hardware already?

waterlesscloud 13y ago

Yeah, the ship has pretty much sailed. Products are either being delivered or are very close to shipping. Some of the smaller operations worked much as you imagine, though. They did FPGA prototypes and then raised funds to move to ASICs. They often raised funds on the bitcoin-denominated stock exchanges. A handful of guys could raise money via an ipo, get the chips produced, open an operation, and then share the revenue with shareholders via dividends. Some operations were just a couple of project manager outsourcing all the engineering and manufacturing. In at least once case, the ASIC design was done via ODesk (!) It was a risky business, on both ends. The investors rarely knew much about the people they were giving money to, and the entrepreneurs were taking money from people they didn't know much about. With no guarantees that anyone had any idea what they were doing. Those companies are reaching their endgames now, having either worked out ok or failed. Millions of dollars have been made, and much money has been lost. It's been fascinating to watch. It's a crazy pace and intensity even for a bunch of startups. There's a nice book in telling their stories, if anyone could actually find any of the people involved. Ha. Worth looking at for their stories- ASICMIner, the first wildly successful ASIC IPO. Active Mining, a rare US based company that IPOed. LabCoin- A company that may or may not have been a scam, but is in the process of failing.

hershel 13y ago

Like you said , this ship has sailed. Maybe there's an open market in memchached acceleration(basically computing hashes). Convey does this with FPGA's[1], and offers 3x performance/$. Or maybe other cloud compute acceleration stuff. I wonder though: if we're talking about using someone like easic.com( so scaling a business would be less risky and more investor friendly, since they can do low and mid volumes) ,How would the investment costs would look like(for 45nm/28nm) ? [1]http://www.enterprisetech.com/2013/09/24/convey-revs-memcached-hybrid-x86-fpga-appliance/ http://www.enterprisetech.com/2013/09/24/convey-revs-memcach...

waterlesscloud 13y ago
eASIC is who the mining company Active Mining I mentioned below partnered with. http://thegenesisblock.com/easic-announces-24-ths-hash-fast-miner-activemining-shares-move-70/ http://thegenesisblock.com/easic-announces-24-ths-hash-fast-...