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Cryptography

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    $\begingroup$ Distributing a cryptanalytic attack is certainly something you could do in general, but whether you would have any reasonable probability of success depends entirely on the cryptosystem and the choice of attack. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 21, 2019 at 14:36
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    $\begingroup$ Also as this seems to be homework, hint: What is 1000 years / 10,000 ? $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 21, 2019 at 14:37
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    $\begingroup$ I guess you could, but usually secure ciphers would take a lot longer than just 1000 years to achieve a brute force attack. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 21, 2019 at 14:37
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    $\begingroup$ @NegativeFriction Yes, you can just run 10,000 servers in parallel. No, this won't break modern ciphers, because modern ciphers don't require "1,000 years" to break. On a fictional computer that can compute a trillion attempts per second, this would require more than an octillion years (10e27). $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 21, 2019 at 22:19
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    $\begingroup$ You're basically assuming—correctly—that brute force key search and password cracking are both examples of what's technically called embarrassingly parallel problems. As a lot of people have told you and I'll summarize, strong cryptography is designed to resist such attacks too, but password-based cryptography is a special case where there's only so much you can do to protect a user who picks a weak password. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 21, 2019 at 22:49