Re-using their design might be no good idea - there are cheaper designs for sure. This new DES cracker would just need to try every possible key - like the one of the EFF already did.

DES was a big standard for encryption, so some people did build such machines, right? Of course did they: [COPACOBANA][1] is able to break DES in under 9 days and costs under 10,000 US $ - That was 2006. You could even run a few of them parallel and crack algorithms like DES even faster - or you just use [RIVYERA][2] and crack DES in 1 day. You can use more than one machine of them, too.

More informations about the DES cracker and the mechanic behind it can be found in [this document][3].

I'm pretty sure there are even better methods as of 2015.


  [1]: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F11894063_9#page-1
  [2]: http://www.voltage.com/blog/crypto/rivyera-from-sciengines/
  [3]: http://cryptome.org/jya/cracking-des/cracking-des.htm