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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: net.arch,net.crypt
Subject: Re: VERY LARGE main memories: cryptography
Message-ID: <1046@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Sun, 31-Aug-86 19:01:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1046
Posted: Sun Aug 31 19:01:53 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 31-Aug-86 20:47:30 EDT
References: <1130@bu-cs.bu-cs.BU.EDU> <2289@peora.UUCP>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 18
Xref: mnetor net.arch:2922 net.crypt:565

[Net.arch has been discussing applications of very large main memories,
on the close order of a gigabyte.]

In article <2289@peora.UUCP>, joel@peora.UUCP (Joel Upchurch) writes:
> 	One thing that no one has mentioned so far  that you could do
> 	with very large memories is table lookups.

This is certainly a useful technique in cryptography.  Someone wrote
a paper on how to break DES that involved writing many megabytes of stuff
on magtape so you could get it back quickly later when breaking an
encrypted message.  Things would be a lot more tractable if the table
was in RAM instead.

Even a medium sized company or country could probably buy enough RAM
to decrypt DES quickly.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
		     May the Source be with you!