than $250,000. In response to DES Challenge II-2, on July 15, 1998, Deep Crack decrypted a DES-encrypted message after only 56 hours of work, winning $10,000. The brute force attack showed that cracking DES was actually a very practical proposition. Most governments and large corporations could reasonably build a machine like Deep Crack. Six months later, in response to RSA Security's DES Challenge III, and in collaboration with distributed.net, the EFF used Deep Crack to decrypt another DES-encrypted message, winning another $10,000. This time, the operation took less than a day – 22 hours and 15 minutes. The decryption was completed on January 19, 1999. In October of that year, DES was reaffirmed as a federal standard, but this time the standard recommended Triple DES. The small key space of DES and relatively high computational costs of Triple DES resulted in its replacement by AES as a Federal standard, effective May 26, 2002. Technology Deep Crack was designed by Cryptography Research, Inc., Advanced Wireless Technologies, and the EFF. The principal designer was Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1,856 custom ASIC DES chips (called Deep Crack or AWT-4500), housed on 29 circuit boards of 64 chips each. The boards were then fitted in six cabinets and mounted in a Sun-4/470 chassis. The search was coordinated by a single PC which assigned ranges of keys to the chips. The entire machine was capable of testing over 90 billion keys per second. It would take about 9 days to test every possible key at that rate. On average, the correct key would be found in half that time. In 2006, another custom hardware attack machine was designed based on FPGAs. COPACOBANA (COst-optimized PArallel COdeBreaker) is able to crack DES at considerably lower cost. This advantage is mainly due to progress in integrated circuit technology. In July 2012, security researchers David Hulton and Moxie Marlinspike unveiled a cloud computing tool for breaking the MS-CHAPv2 protocol by recovering the protocol's DES encryption keys by brute force. This tool effectively allows members of the general public to recover a DES key from a known plaintext–ciphertext pair in about 24 hours. References External links The DES Cracker at the Electronic Frontier Foundation Photos of the machine at Cryptography Research A FPGA implementation using 48 Virtex-6 LX240Ts ASIC design from 1994 that could crack DES in 24 hours with 256 custom chips Cryptographic