When using a Pico FPGA cluster, however, each FPGA is able
to perform 1.6 billion DES operations per second. A cluster
of 176 FPGAs, installed into a single server using standard
PCI Express slots, is capable of processing more than 280
billion DES operations per second. This means that a key
recovery that would take years to perform on a PC, even
with GPU acceleration, could be accomplished in less than
three days on the FPGA cluster.
So, they managed to brute-force DES a lot faster. No crypto breakthrough, please move along. :)
This should have been titled "FPGA cluster brute-forces DES in record time" or something like that.
Even that isn't true. Deep Crack took 56 hours (matching the "less than three days" claimed in the article), while the combined Deep Crack + Distributed.Net effort took less than 24 hours.
Sorry, my bad. I didn't bother to research, just pulled that from the article.
Pico Computing has announced that it has achieved the
highest-known benchmark speeds for 56-bit DES decryption,
with reported throughput of over 280 billion keys per
second achieved using a single, hardware-accelerated server.
What can I say? Pico Computing likes to brag and Dr. Dobb's published an article about it. As you said in your first comment, there's nothing new about this.
This should have been titled "FPGA cluster brute-forces DES in record time" or something like that.