We are just begining to see real availability of Cryptograhic Smart Cards and Crypto Ring. The John Swift Secret Decoder ring has become reality.

Some of these rings even have a Java virtual machine in them.

Development projects are currently underway to support smart cards, crypto cards, and crypto rings under Linux.

With the immense connectivity of the internet, we are seeing the emergence of distributed crypto crackers.

"Chinese Television" crypto crackers were a interesting thought experiment. What if every television in China was equipped with a code cracking chip that could be harnessed (presumably by the government) to crack crypto when the TV was not in use (or maybe when it was). The parallelism which results from a distributed attack like this, is now possible in a connected world such as we have...

Someone has even advertised and S/MIME cracking screen savers which runs an S/MIME cracker on a target message whenever your system is idle and the screen saver is running.

One of the 500 fastest super computers was recently constructed for about $150,000 (peanuts for governments and large corporations) running Linux on 68 off the shelf Alpha processors. Low cost Beowolf supercomputers like this make crypto cracking with reach of even those of modest means...