re off the shelf cheap des keyseach machine was re corporate acceptance of the wiretap chip in article strnlghtc wcmo fx netcom com strnlght netcom com david sternlight writes 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 given that certain archival methods have certain key cleartext in a file i used a programatic dictionary attack i used the des library provided with the system that i was using what is to keep anyone from being lucky with a key he probably should also tell us given his address what machine he used a desktop workstation or super computer my previous employment has nothing to do with my current address other than the fact that the fastest machine in the office was an ibm risc system model with meg of memory not a super computer depending on his answer this could be an appalling development calling into question both des and rsa des dunno about rsa idea i really think this more of a statement of the limitations placed on the key by the interface ascii char no padding and most programs don t bother to clear off the archival front and backend id s 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 yes any moderatly bright programmer with a little idle machine time can crack most of todays real world encryption i sure that you or i could select a key and prepare the data inorder that the decryption will become a worst case but that is not the real world and i m sure that is how any agency would start an attack on a message as you pointed out there are some very good recognition algorithms availible i m just not familiar with them a g a g russell dept a s oltp section of pals group vm id sc at ausvm email arussell austin ibm com phone tieline these are my views on anyone else they would look silly free the berkeley
