[Cryptography] on brute forcing 3DES to attack SIMs

[Ben Laurie]

On 1 January 2015 at 17:50, ianG <iang at iang.org> wrote:
>
>
> http://threatpost.com/majority-of-4g-usb-modems-sim-cards-exploitable/110139
>
> “To brute-force DES keys, we use a set of field-programmable gate arrays
> (FPGA), which became trendy for Bitcoin mining a couple of years ago and got
> cheaper after the hype was over,” the researchers wrote. “The speed of our 8
> modules *ZTEX 1.15y board with the price tag of 2,000 Euro is 245.760
> Mcrypt/sec. It is enough to obtain the key within 3 days.”
>
> That was their fastest brute-force. If they had a partially known 3DES key,
> they could break it in 10 days.

Wat? None of this makes sense. Presumably this is why you omitted the
next sentence:

"Deploying standard processing power, like the Intel CPU (Core
i7-2600k), would take roughly five years to break DES and more than 20
years to break 3DES."

Right. 3DES has 2 bits more security than DES. Check.

Well, I guess they said more than 2 bits, so its true, right?