network parallel decryption amateur style

[Matt Blaze]

>Recent postings have gotten me to thinking:  If we wrote a
>easily portable UNIX program to decrypt DES in parallel across
>our many machines, how fast could we go?
>

Using the fastest software DES implementation I know of, optimized for
fast single-bit key change, it would take about a million SparcStation-years
(at 100% utilization) to do an exhaustive DES search.

Even assuming a order of magnitude faster than that (from a better
implementation or faster common workstation hardware), that's still
an awful lot of Sparc-years you'd have to get "the net" to donate.

-matt