[Cryptography] Samsung Begins Manufacturing ASIC Chips for Mining Cryptocurrency

[Natanael]

Den 6 feb. 2018 19:38 skrev "Tom Mitchell" <mitch at niftyegg.com>:

Apparently...

Samsung has designed and will be shipping ASIC Chips for Mining
Cryptocurrency.
Does this have impact on the economics and security of normal encryption.
Short key lengths seem like a bad idea.


Nope. They're not FPGA:s.

They're single-algorithm single-mode highly optimized massively parallel
iterators.

A template for a block is created, and then every mining unit creates a
bunch of valid variations of it to increase the available entropy, then
thousands of individual cores in the unit just run the chosen proof-of-work
algorithm based on this block (header) after inserting a random number in
the specified field.

It will then check the output against the difficulty threshold, reject and
increase the counter for the next cycle if it fails. Requesting new
templates when the core is running out of random numbers to test (Bitcoin's
header nonce is only 32 bits or so).

To be at risk of attack due to this, you either have to be using an
algorithm configured exactly as one of these popular PoW methods (very
unlikely) or use one where the PoW mining engineering research by itself is
sufficient to make an attack against you cheaper (imagining NSA stealing
ASIC blueprints to build a dedicated crypto cracker).
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