naily - Slashdot User

Comment Re:That's silly. (Score 1) 212

by naily on Sunday January 16, 2011 @08:40AM (#34896074) Attached to: Amazon EC2 Enables Cheap Brute-Force Attacks

Or maybe the same role that military contractors have to ensure that dodgy countries can't buy state-of-the-art weapons. It's not just a matter of principle, it's a matter of threat assessment. WPA-PSK today... tomorrow SSL? Yes, there are several orders of magnitude in difficulty between them, but EC2 is all about massive scalability, right?

Amazon EC2 Enables Cheap Brute-Force Attacks 212

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 13, 2011 @05:50PM from the this-gun-for-hire dept.

snydeq writes "German white-hat hacker Thomas Roth claims he can crack WPA-PSK-protected networks in six minutes using Amazon EC2 compute power — an attack that would cost him $1.68. The key? Amazon's new cluster GPU instances. 'GPUs are (depending on the algorithm and the implementation) some hundred times faster compared to standard quad-core CPUs when it comes to brute forcing SHA-1 and MD,' Roth explained. GPU-assisted servers were previously available only in supercomputers and not to the public at large, according to Roth; that's changed with EC2. Among the questions Roth's research raises is, what role should Amazon and other public-cloud service providers play in preventing customers from using their services to commit crimes?"

Neal Stephenson Returns with "Anathem" 248

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday March 31, 2008 @05:45PM from the hoping-for-a-hit-not-a-miss dept.

Lev Grossman writes to tell us that Neal Stephenson, author of greats like Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, has another novel due for release in September. The catalogue copy gives us a small glimpse at what may be in store: "Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians--sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable 'saecular' world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown."

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