Is this the end of PGP and True Crypt

[b***@brother.us]

So how long will it take to break a PGP or True Crypt file?
New York Times
June 9, 2008
Military Supercomputer Sets Record
By John Markoff
SAN FRANCISCO — An American military supercomputer, assembled from
components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a
long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026
quadrillion calculations per second.
The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest
supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California.
The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to
the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and
scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los
Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military
problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will
continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the
behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an
explosion.
Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to
explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the
Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate
models with higher accuracy.
To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P.
D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security
Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand
calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a
week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.
The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and
advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer
scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential
to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.
The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand
trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial
milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United
States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European
Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic
competitiveness.
By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time —
compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers —
petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter
science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask
questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform
experiments that would previously have been impractical.
“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack
Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for
several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.
Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to
faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and
hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the
computer industry for consumer and business products.
Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented
computing began dominating research and development spending on technology
shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is
evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.
The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips
that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel
processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game
machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for
portions of calculations.
The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron
processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used
in corporate servers.
“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said
Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the
consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms
of cellphones and embedded electronics.”
The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will
most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity
of the system’s hardware.
Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the
power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate
programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers
have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the
machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.
“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,” said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist
who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a
window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have
never seen before.”
Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years
personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even
hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques
for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are
skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful
examples.
“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu
you’re driving will benefit from this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer
designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based
in Richardson, Tex.
Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers
of the world, he suggested.
Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the
resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.
Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in
the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title
of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical
calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M.
reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge,
however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in
high-performance computing.
“It’s a sign that we are maintaining our position,“ said Peter J. Ungaro,
chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that
“the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the
machines.”
Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward
the next generation of supercomputing. “You do these record-setting things
because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and
the one who is there first will be the leader,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio,
an I.B.M. executive vice president.
By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected,
the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace
of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing
power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a
quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the
yottaflop and the xeraflop.

[Unruh]

Post by b***@brother.us
So how long will it take to break a PGP or True Crypt file?

How long is the key? You can always keep ahead of the supercomputers by
simply increasing your key size. Basically something like 4 bits longer for
each doubling of speed of the supercomputers.
(at the 1000 bit size level)

Post by b***@brother.us
New York Times
June 9, 2008
Military Supercomputer Sets Record
By John Markoff
SAN FRANCISCO — An American military supercomputer, assembled from
components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a
long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026
quadrillion calculations per second.

<rest deleted>

[Arthur T.]

In

Post by b***@brother.us
So how long will it take to break a PGP or True Crypt file?

There are faster ways to factor than trying to divide by all
lower numbers (up to its sqrt), but let's look at this brute force
method.

This computer can perform about 1e12 calculations per second.
Let's say that dividing huge numbers requires only one calculation
(which is unlikely).

Then to factor a 1024-bit number will require (on average)
2**510 operations. My calculations show that 2**510/10**12
seconds is somewhat over 10**134 years. I'm not worried.

To break a symmetric cypher with a 256-bit key will take (on
average) 2**128 operations. That'll take only 10**19 years. I'm
still not worried.

[Arthur T.]

Post by Arthur T.
In

Post by b***@brother.us
So how long will it take to break a PGP or True Crypt file?

There are faster ways to factor than trying to divide by all
lower numbers (up to its sqrt), but let's look at this brute force
method.
This computer can perform about 1e12 calculations per second.
Let's say that dividing huge numbers requires only one calculation
(which is unlikely).
Then to factor a 1024-bit number will require (on average)
2**510 operations. My calculations show that 2**510/10**12
seconds is somewhat over 10**134 years. I'm not worried.
To break a symmetric cypher with a 256-bit key will take (on
average) 2**128 operations. That'll take only 10**19 years. I'm
still not worried.

Before someone else points out my error: 1 quadrillion is
10**15, not 10**12. So, again assuming only one instruction to
divide long numbers and one instruction to test a key, the times
are:

2**510 operations in almost 4*10**133 years
2**128 operations in about 10**18.6 years

Notice that a factor of 1000 improvement doesn't make much
difference. (Assuming I got the rest right, of course.)

If they improve to 10**30 instructions/second, it might be
time to give up on 256-bit encryption as it'll take only a bit
over 1000 years to decrypt. 512-bit will take more than 10**42
years.

[Unruh]

Post by Arthur T.
In

Post by b***@brother.us
So how long will it take to break a PGP or True Crypt file?

There are faster ways to factor than trying to divide by all
lower numbers (up to its sqrt), but let's look at this brute force
method.

Much much much faster.

Post by Arthur T.
This computer can perform about 1e12 calculations per second.
Let's say that dividing huge numbers requires only one calculation
(which is unlikely).
Then to factor a 1024-bit number will require (on average)
2**510 operations. My calculations show that 2**510/10**12
seconds is somewhat over 10**134 years. I'm not worried.
To break a symmetric cypher with a 256-bit key will take (on
average) 2**128 operations. That'll take only 10**19 years. I'm
still not worried.

The Number field sieve has a rate which goes something like
e^(1.9 ln(N)^1/3 ln(ln(N))^2/3)
Thus for 1024 bits, the "run time" is roughly
6 10^25 operations. or 10^13 sec at 10^12/sec which is "only" 10^7 years.

But if we increase N to 2^1050 that doubles the number of operations. Ie
for each doubling one needs about an extra 22 bits Ie, one can keep ahead
of increases in computer power with only small increases in the number of
bits needed.

Post by Arthur T.
--
Arthur T. - ar23hur "at" intergate "dot" com
Looking for a z/OS (IBM mainframe) systems programmer position