So the project to crack a 64-bit RC5 encryption key is over. Some computer in Japan figured it out in July, but everybody was too busy to notice until last week. The real news here isn’t that 64-bit RC5 is crackable (everybody knew it could be done, eventually), the real news is that they compiled efficiency statistics on the various computer platforms that did the job. Here’s the quote, straight from their press release: “Our peak rate of 270,147,024 kkeys/sec is equivalent to 32,504 800MHz Apple PowerBook G4 laptops or 45,998 2GHz AMD Athlon XP machines…”
To emphasize the point, it takes about 1.5 PCs to do the work of one Mac, even though they operate at very different clock rates.
Hmmm.