re off the shelf cheap des keyseach machine was re corporate acceptance of the wiretap chip in article c uvn mf austin ibm com arussell austin ibm com ag russell writes at the company i worked for previously i received a file that was des encryped and the person that had sent it went on vaction rather than wait two weeks i set up a straight frontal attack with one key at a time it only took two days to crack the file no i don t have any faith in des taking this at face value though it seems quite dissonant with much else that has been published here about brute force des cracking unless russell was lucky with respect to the key i d be very interested in whether the program russell used is available in whether he used a cleartext recognition algorithm in the program or whether he had to examine each decryption by hand in whether he used a known plaintext attack he probably should also tell us given his address what machine he used a desktop workstation or super computer depending on his answer this could be an appalling development calling into question both des and rsa des dunno about rsa idea if any bright programmer with a little idle machine time can crack a single des message in a couple of days assuming no tricks that are message specific then here s my clipper key nsa give me the chip at once david david sternlight great care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of our information errors and omissions excepted
