Brute Force and Sophistication

10th February 2010

These are lecture notes from my Computer Science course, not a general reference for "Brute Force and Sophistication"

Sources of power for brute force

• Supercomputing
• Dedicated crypto-hardware
• Re-programmable hardware
• The web

Special Purpose Hardware

• Breaking enigma code
• Expensive

Lots of stuff in this lecture that is just random background; stuff about cracking RC5 and DES using the web mass-computing stuff.

Quantum Computing

Forget Brute Force. Quantum Computing can do everything in parallel. However there’s a catch; you can only look at one result; the state ‘collapses’ in a manner consistent to the observation.

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