Pico Computing Achieves 280 Billion Keys/sec for 56-bit DES Decryption
Pico Computing has achieved a throughput of over 280 billion keys per second using a single, hardware-accelerated server. According to Pico Computing, this is the highest-known benchmark speeds for 56-bit DES decryption. The FPGA computing platform assembled by Pico Computing for this demonstration, based on 11 Pico EX-Series cards, reportedly consumes less than 1000 peak watts of power and fits into a single off-the-shelf 4U server.
The DES cracking algorithm uses brute force methods to analyze the entire DES 56-bit keyspace. The massively parallel algorithm iteratively decrypts fixed-size blocks of data to find keys that decrypt into ASCII numbers. This technique is often used for recovering the keys of encrypted files containing known types of data. The candidate keys that are found in this way can then be more thoroughly tested to determine which candidate key is correct.
Such brute force attacks are computationally expensive and beyond the reach of software algorithms running on standard servers or PCs, even when equipped with GPU accelerators. Current-generation CPU cores can process approximately 16 million DES key operations per second. A GPU card such as the GTX-295 can be programmed to process approximately 250 million such operations per second.
When using a Pico FPGA cluster, however, each FPGA is able to perform 1.6 billion DES operations per second. A cluster of 176 FPGAs, installed into a single server using standard PCI Express slots, is capable of processing more than 280 billion DES operations per second. This means that a key recovery that would take years to perform on a PC, even with GPU acceleration, could be accomplished in less than three days on the FPGA cluster.
The 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES) is now considered obsolete, having been replaced by newer and more secure Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption methods. Nonetheless DES continues to serve an important role in cryptographic research, and in the development and auditing of current and future block-based encryption algorithms.
More info: Pico Computing
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