>Wanna bet the NSA gets volume discounts from nVidia/AMD?
So you think they're actually using off-the-shelf GPUs for their password breaking? I would assume any operation with a budget like theirs would create their own ASIC chips specifically targeting the algorithms they need to run. We've seen this happen for Bitcoin hashing, so I'm sure the NSA is way ahead of them.
* Sun Microsystems put special instruction into their CPUs to aid in faster decryption efforts.
If I was designing such a system I'd stick a bunch of GOST, AES, SHA256, Blowfish ... brute forcing cores embedded in a small reconfigurable mesh. It would make a very effective multipurpose brute forcing device.
Antminer S2-b4 can do 2 trillion hashes a second and costs 1200 USD[0]. Imagine you are the NSA with tens of billions of dollars to spend on rigs, access to major fabs and you've been attacking crypto for the last 60 years.
Why FPGAs? I though they were much slower, and if you're building out a berjillion nodes you probably don't require the reconfigurability because the problem is known.
So you think they're actually using off-the-shelf GPUs for their password breaking? I would assume any operation with a budget like theirs would create their own ASIC chips specifically targeting the algorithms they need to run. We've seen this happen for Bitcoin hashing, so I'm sure the NSA is way ahead of them.