jamess

For reasons relating to a bit of reverse engineering I was doing today (er, yesterday now... sleep schedule isn't going too well), I got thinking about how long it would take to crack a single DES key on commodity hardware today. While I was thinking, I hit on a novel idea. Distributed computing using javascript piggybacking on unsuspecting browsers.

It occurred to me that a site like youtube, if they parcelled out the DES key space to their browsers in leisurely 10,000 key increments such that you could check them in the background while watching a 1 minute video without making a dent in the CPU, could crack a DES key in something like 3 years in the average case (assuming a zero growth rate in audience.)

I going to have to think about how to manage the key space such that I don't chew more CPU doing that than I would checking the keys personally, however I think I'm going to implement this little experiment in distributed computing and see if I can attract people to paste some javascript on their personal blogs and suchlike.

Anyone interested in joining in, either as a developer or eventual cracker?