In 1998 the Electronic Frontier Foundation built the EFF DES Cracker. It cost around $250,000 and involved making 1,856 custom chips and 29 circuit boards, all housed in 6 chassis, and took around 9 days to exhaust the keyspace. Today, with the advent of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), we’ve built a system with 48 Virtex-6 LX240Ts which can exhaust the keyspace in around 26 hours, and have provided it for the research community to use. Our hope is that this will better demonstrate the insecurity of DES and move people to adopt more secure modern encryption standards.

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