septillion operations per second

[Ben Laurie]

Barry Wels wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> In James Bamford's new book 'Body of Secrets' he claims the NSA is working on some FAST computers.
> http://www.randomhouse.com/features/bamford/book.html
> ---
> 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.
> ---
> 
> 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 ...

10^24 is roughly 2^80. So, to _count_ to 2^128 would take 2^48 seconds.
That's around 9 million years. Or, for a million of them, 9 years.

Cheers,

Ben.

--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html

In Boston 'til 1st July.



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