Custom hardware attack

Concept in cryptography The EFF's "Deep Crack" machine contained 1,856 custom chips and could brute force a DES key in a matter of days — the photo shows a circuit board fitted with 32 custom attack chips In cryptography, a custom hardware attack uses specifically designed application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) to decipher encrypted messages. Mounting a cryptographic brute force attack requires a large number of similar computations: typically trying one key, checking if the resulting decryption gives a meaningful answer, and then trying the next key if it does not. Computers can perform these calculations at a rate of millions per second, and thousands of computers can be harnessed together in a distributed computing network. But the number of computations required on average grows exponentially with the size of the key, and for many problems standard computers are not fast enough. On the other hand, many cryptographic algorithms lend themselves to fast implementation in hardware, i.e. networks of logic circuits, also known as gates. Integrated circuits (ICs) are constructed of these gates and often can execute cryptographic algorithms hundreds of times faster than a ge