YHBW.

[maradydd]

Observation just now from Radu Sion during the FC rump session: in the cloud, it costs about $5 million to brute-force 64 bits of symmetric key.

Comments

[mouser]

That's both scary and sorta non-surprising...

[krfsm]

What time-scale are we looking at? Or is this a pure time-vs-power tradeoff, so $5M buys me enough computations, either in parallel or over time, to brute-force? Five minutes but very visible to the cloud providers, or five days, but much less visible?

[vatine]

I think CPU pricing is in CPU seconds, so using X CPU for 2T is (approximately) the same as using 2X CPU for T (though there's probably a RAM charge that makes the total prices 2TX+2RT and 2TX+RT).

[krfsm]

Why am I thinking of the Mailman from "True Names" here?

[jrtom]

Presumably it depends on how parallelizable (or, since they apparently have a specific method in mind, parallelized) the computation is.

What I'd like to see is a graph of bucks-per-bits (i.e., how many $ does it take to brute-force a 96-bit key, and so on?).