Śawt

Śawt ሠ is a letter of the Ge'ez abugida, descended from Epigraphic South Arabian , in Ge'ez representing ś. It is reconstructed as descended from a Proto-Semitic voiceless lateral fricative *ś [ɬ]. It survived only in South Semitic as an independent phoneme.

See also

AWT

AWT may stand for:

EFF DES cracker

In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of DES cipher's key space – that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that DES's key was not long enough to be secure.

Background

DES uses a 56-bit key, meaning that there are 2⁵⁶ possible keys under which a message can be encrypted. This is exactly 72,057,594,037,927,936, or approximately 72 quadrillion possible keys. One of the major criticisms of DES, when proposed in 1975, was that the key size was too short. Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie of Stanford University estimated that a machine fast enough to test that many keys in a day would have cost about $20 million in 1976, an affordable sum to national intelligence agencies such as the US National Security Agency. Subsequent advances in the price/performance of chips kept reducing that cost until twenty years later it became affordable to even a small nonprofit organization such as the EFF.