FPGA's however are not excessively hard to design nor are they enormously
expensive to fabricate. My memory is quite rusty on this but I seem to
recall a non-profit group wanted to attack the distributed.net problem
from a new angle. Rather than using a large number of commodity PC's,
they had something like 10-15 FPGA's (field programmable gate-array's,
task-specific processors that can be reprogrammed on the fly) with very
specific instruction sets on a special PCB that connected directly to a
normal PC (I don't recall how).
EFF's "Deep Crack" was based on FPGAs, and was used to
brute-force 56-bit DES encryption in less than 3 days. They used
similar hard to help the distributed.net effort. See
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