Pretty Evil

3 Responses to Pretty Evil

1. gorgonzola says:

   September 27, 2013 at 10:30 am

   Unfortunately, this isn’t terribly new.

   When DES was being standardized, NSA pressured NIST into limiting the key size to 56 bits. This key size was small enough such that the NSA would have the resources to decrypt a coded message, but large enough for this cracking capability to be just out off the reach of industrial espionage.

   The publication of an NSA-approved encryption standard simultaneously resulted in its quick international adoption and widespread academic scrutiny. Controversies arose out of classified design elements, a relatively short key length of the symmetric-key block cipher design, and the involvement of the NSA, nourishing suspicions about a backdoor. The intense academic scrutiny the algorithm received over time led to the modern understanding of block ciphers and their cryptanalysis.
   DES is now considered to be insecure for many applications. This is chiefly due to the 56-bit key size being too small; in January, 1999, distributed.net and the Electronic Frontier Foundation collaborated to publicly break a DES key in 22 hours and 15 minutes (see chronology).

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard

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2. gorgonzola says:

   September 27, 2013 at 10:31 am

   sorry, that was meant for the SHA-3 post…

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3. Earl Killian says:

   September 28, 2013 at 5:47 pm

   Wow, first Inhofe, now ALEC. They are really headed downhill.

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