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Crypto-breaking hardware is very different from your average server farm. The best crypto-breaking algorithms are parallel, and you need to spend a few hundred million dollars on a suitable ASIC setup to brute force 128 bits symmetric crypto. https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/bruteforce-20050425.pdf

While the likes of Google Amazon and Facebooks may have that much hardware, they most certainly don't have that much crypto breaking hardware.



So... very large GPU rigs?

The kind you use for processing images and doing machine learning?

The kinda stuff that Google, Amazon and Facebook all do, on a massive scale?


No, not GPUs. GPUs are good at floating point vector math, not the bit shuffling operations that dominate the runtime of symmetric encryption or hashing. Custom ASICs specialized for crypto computations get orders of magnitude better power efficiency than GPUs at cracking.

For instance, in bitcoin mining (dominated by the SHA-256 calculation), the best GPUs get 0.013 MH/J while current ASICs get 10182 MH/J [0], so almost a million times more work per unit of energy.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison


Yea with FPGAs you literally have the circuits change to the software spec which is far and away more efficient in terms of hashes per kwh




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