septillion operations per second

[Helger Lipmaa]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Barry Wels wrote:

> The secret community is also home to the largest collection of
> hyper-powerful computers, advanced mathematicians and skilled language
> experts on the planet. Within the city, time is measured in
> femtosecondsone million billionth of a second, and scientists work in
> secret to develop computers capable of performing more than one
> septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) operations every
> second. ---

this is of course, science fiction. (remember Planck constant, speed of
light, etc.)

> If they ever build such a computer (or 1.000.000 of them) what would
> that mean for today's key lengths ? I am curious how long a computer
> capable of a septillion operations per second would take to crack one
> 128 bit or 256 bit key. Or a RSA 1024 or 2048 bit key for that matter
> ...

2^128/10^24=340282366920938.4634633746077 (seconds), so even assuming such
a computer would do 10^24 key searches per second (as opposes to 10^24
'instructions'), it would still take ten million years for one computer.

Helger




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