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Topic: Why you will never get an ASIC miner, for real. (Read 6030 times)

hero member
Activity: 784
Merit: 500
They said so .... that doesn't imply they did, or shiped a shoe Smiley

full member
Activity: 126
Merit: 100
Oh hai guys!

An Avalon ASIC has shipped, ROFL.

I guess I was wrong.

 Grin
hero member
Activity: 896
Merit: 532
Former curator of The Bitcoin Museum
2. it would be like trying to see the contents of a black hole.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!
mjc
hero member
Activity: 588
Merit: 500
Available on Kindle
Let's say it was possible, then there should be a change in what is used to secure technology. 

Technology is not so tied to an implementation that it cannot change.

One example progression:
SSL
SSLv2
SSLv3
TLS

Look at the number of ciphers . key lengths and the such that make up the collection of various SSL implementations.

Then look at Rainbow tables and whats happening there with password cracking.  As the tables grow the methods used to store passwords change. 

The industry will adapt to the evolving threats and live on.

Just to be clear though, as stated earlier, SHA is only a hash and part of an encryption system, not encryption by itself.

Another thought, given that there was a couple million dollars put into the existing ASIC effort, and part of that is profit for the companies creating ASIC, how difficult would it be for large criminal organization or a state entity, spend that sort of money to build it themselves, it is was possible to use it to perform a real attack. 

Given BTC @ $16.83 that's just my 0.001188 BTC


hero member
Activity: 2618
Merit: 548
DGbet.fun - Crypto Sportsbook
Faggot conspiracy theorist OP ran away.
member
Activity: 101
Merit: 10
You are an idiot....
1. You are a dyed in the wool troll... trolls have no understanding of technology.
2. You cannot 'decrypt a hash' , it would be like trying to see the contents of a black hole.
3. An ASIC is just that.... APPLICATION SPECIFIC INTEGRATED CIRCUIT.... it would be like buying a Skoda and thinking that putting a new set of windscreen wipers in it will make it a Rolls Royce.

You ever see the Top Gear when they compared a Rolls Royce to a Mercedes to a "Bentley" ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyH-351Z_-0&t=1m17s Give it like a minute or so.

Is that a spare they have under the front hood? Hilarious... Almost as hilarious as the dude who started this thread.
member
Activity: 74
Merit: 10

Now someone tell me I am wrong.

Thanks.

donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
Let's put bitcoin aside, and focus completely on security here, since you've made that a serious concern. Here's the thing with security, it's exponentially more difficult to break, for every small difficulty increase in encrypting. This means it'll always be much easier to increase difficulty, than it will to break the harder difficulty. As technology advances and we get fast machines to break 256  bit encryption, 512 comes out, and after some time, we can then break 512, but it's already been upgraded to 1024, and so on.

Well no.  Lets ignore that SHA-256 is a hash not encryption and thus with infinite amount of time and infinite amount of energy you can't "decrypt" SHA-256.

Still 256 but keys are sufficiently large that even at the thermodynamic limit (i.e. a theoretically perfect computer) there is insufficient energy and matter in our solar system (i.e. kill everything and convert the entire solar system into a super computer which uses the complete output of our star until it dies) to even .... COUNT to 256 bit, much less perform any complex calculations.  It is possible that encrypting algorithms will be compromised due to undiscovered flaws which allow attackers to perform attacks at faster than brute force but 256 bit keys will not be brute forced.

For information on the energy requirements (using an as on yet not invented perfect computer) required to count to 2^256 ...
Quote
These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow. And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html

legendary
Activity: 2058
Merit: 1452
The U.S. Government is who is preventing ASIC I can almost guarantee you.
proof? inb4 "the lack of proof proves the conspiracy!" logic
full member
Activity: 155
Merit: 100
So you see, while it take so incredibly little time to encrypt, the decryption time grows exponentially larger with each little bit of security you add. So, would it be possible for someone to create some ASICs that are designed to break security in use today? Sure, but as soon as that was figured out, everyone would just increase what security strength they use, and all the ASICs become completely useless then. It would be interesting if someone started working on ASICs for 2048 bit encryption of some popular types, then waited for everyone to upgrade (creating rainbow tables or whatever in the meantime), then they could attack several companies at a single time before everyone noes up to 4096. It'd be a bit surprising to jump up in security, only to find it less secure than what everyone was just on.

I'm not quite sure how processing SHA256 hashes using ASICs is "impossible" or that 'they' would never allow it.  I suspect a basic lack of understanding of the underlying technologies by the OP.

Regarding building ASICs specifically for the purposes of decryption, its already been done a very long time ago.  Here is one example I can think of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker

The principal designer was Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1856 custom ASIC DES chips (called Deep Crack or AWT-4500), housed on 29 circuit boards of 64 chips each.

Really cool read, thanks for the link. However, this is not quite the same as what I proposed. I was talking about building ASICs for security that we'll use in the future, not what security we're using now, or what was used in the past. You could, for instance, figure out what key bit length the government is currently using, double it, and build a massive ASIC far for that. After a few years, when the government upgrades their encryption (hopefully not to a new algorithm, just a new key length), you'll turn your machines on and be cranking away at intercepted messages or passwords. So, while they think they're getting higher security (which they are), they're also stepping into the hands of someone with deep pockets who's ready to break that security. That's a partially dangerous situation for any government.
hero member
Activity: 574
Merit: 500
Quote
Ltcfaucet, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this forum is now dumber for having read it. May God have mercy on your soul.


I felt superior until u pointed this out ....I hold u responsible for me feeling stupid Cry
full member
Activity: 196
Merit: 100
Explain!

How am I wrong?

You've misunderstood pretty much everything.
vip
Activity: 156
Merit: 103
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
Explain!

How am I wrong?

First, you cannot "decrypt" a hash.  Go read a cryptography primer.
mrb
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 1028
You will never have a commercially made ASIC miner for SHA encryption!

Until every organisation on the internet and off the internet changes the way they encrypt their information, you are out of luck.

Reason being:
This ASIC hardware could too easily be reverse engineered to decrypt SHA. And with it's small size and power consumption they could be ran almost anywhere barely undetected constantly attacking SHA at an incredible rate. Essentially these devices would put too much power into public hands.

If you are going to continue to pursue this Bitcoin mining game you better load up on FPGAs and GPUs!

Now someone tell me I am wrong.

Thanks.

You are wrong Smiley Nobody has given you a full technical response, so here is one:

- First of all SHA256 is hashing, not encryption
- Mining ASICs can only do 1 thing (find x such as SHA256(SHA256(x)) has zeros in the low 32 bits). They cannot be used for general attacks (eg. given y, find x such as SHA256(x) = y).
- There is no point in reverse engineering them: their design is simple, cryptographers can easily design some to suit their exact problem, and have already done so in the past: http://rijndael.ece.vt.edu/sha3/publications/DATE2012SHA3.pdf
- Cryptographers designed SHA256 to resist bruteforce attacks (by ASICs or any fast hardware) thanks to the sheer size of the output hash and conservative design. For example, finding a SHA256 pre-image takes on average 2^256 calls to the compression function. ASICs only bring a relatively tiny performance improvement over FPGAs of at most ~50x (per mm² of die area). 50x is huge for Bitcoin, but tiny cryptographically speaking. So a pre-image attack on ASIC would be equivalent to a 2^250 pre-image attack on FPGA. Big deal. No one cares. This is not a world-changing event.

Bottom line: cryptographers already planned for fast SHA256 hardware, this hardware already exists, and this hardware is not constantly breaking the world.
full member
Activity: 155
Merit: 100
So you see, while it take so incredibly little time to encrypt, the decryption time grows exponentially larger with each little bit of security you add. So, would it be possible for someone to create some ASICs that are designed to break security in use today? Sure, but as soon as that was figured out, everyone would just increase what security strength they use, and all the ASICs become completely useless then. It would be interesting if someone started working on ASICs for 2048 bit encryption of some popular types, then waited for everyone to upgrade (creating rainbow tables or whatever in the meantime), then they could attack several companies at a single time before everyone noes up to 4096. It'd be a bit surprising to jump up in security, only to find it less secure than what everyone was just on.

I'm not quite sure how processing SHA256 hashes using ASICs is "impossible" or that 'they' would never allow it.  I suspect a basic lack of understanding of the underlying technologies by the OP.

Regarding building ASICs specifically for the purposes of decryption, its already been done a very long time ago.  Here is one example I can think of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker

The principal designer was Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1856 custom ASIC DES chips (called Deep Crack or AWT-4500), housed on 29 circuit boards of 64 chips each.

I was sure something existed somewhere. Thanks for the link!
donator
Activity: 2058
Merit: 1007
Poor impulse control.
You will never have a commercially made ASIC miner for SHA encryption!

Until every organisation on the internet and off the internet changes the way they encrypt their information, you are out of luck.

Reason being:
This ASIC hardware could too easily be reverse engineered to decrypt SHA. And with it's small size and power consumption they could be ran almost anywhere barely undetected constantly attacking SHA at an incredible rate. Essentially these devices would put too much power into public hands.

If you are going to continue to pursue this Bitcoin mining game you better load up on FPGAs and GPUs!

Now someone tell me I am wrong.

Thanks.
Ltcfaucet, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this forum is now dumber for having read it. May God have mercy on your soul.

Hey! He only wished (3 times in all) for someone to tell him that he's wrong, not that he's some kind of intelligence-reducing contagious meme producer. Give away insults like that for free and we'll all be out of a job.
full member
Activity: 196
Merit: 100
Another block in the wall
.........Everyone on this forum is now dumber for having read it. May God have mercy on your soul.

Damn.

legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1012
Democracy is vulnerable to a 51% attack.
You will never have a commercially made ASIC miner for SHA encryption!

Until every organisation on the internet and off the internet changes the way they encrypt their information, you are out of luck.

Reason being:
This ASIC hardware could too easily be reverse engineered to decrypt SHA. And with it's small size and power consumption they could be ran almost anywhere barely undetected constantly attacking SHA at an incredible rate. Essentially these devices would put too much power into public hands.

If you are going to continue to pursue this Bitcoin mining game you better load up on FPGAs and GPUs!

Now someone tell me I am wrong.

Thanks.
Ltcfaucet, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this forum is now dumber for having read it. May God have mercy on your soul.
full member
Activity: 125
Merit: 101
If you succeed to decrypt SHA you would have invented infinite data compression. Cheesy

+1
donator
Activity: 1617
Merit: 1012
If you succeed to decrypt SHA you would have invented infinite data compression. Cheesy
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