re off the shelf cheap des keyseach machine was re corporate acceptance of the wiretap chip in article apr magnus acs ohio state edu jebright magnus acs ohio state edu james r ebright writes now why is that i doubt there is a trapdoor in skipjack but we will never know and i doubt the nsa would promote a mass market chip they couldn t compromise ergo nsa is now capable of compromising probably with brute force keysearch engines of the complexity of skipjack look at the specs why i bet they have thousands of little chips chugging away in their crypto busters maybe even tens of thousands complexity not much more than a how many such machines will fit into fort meade i think pgp should have bit idea keys thousands tens of thousands do some arithmetic please skipjack has possible keys let s assume a brute force engine like that hypothesized for des microsecond per trial million chips that s trials per second or about years for trials well maybe they can get chips running at one trial per nanosecond and build a machine with million chips sure only years for each solution idea uses bit keys shall i bother doing the calculations for you hint multiply years by and you can t do idea at that speed key setup takes much too long i wouldn t be surprised if that were the case for skipjack too though there s no way of knowing just yet des used only xor because that s what was feasible with mid s technology modern chips can do a lot more nsa may or may not know how to crack skipjack and idea i doubt it for the former i have no idea for the latter though it does seem to be a strong cryptosystem but it ain t gonna be by exhaustive search
